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BRYN DONOVAN

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50 Spooky Writing Prompts and Horror Story Ideas

If you’re looking for scary story prompts or horror writing ideas, you’ve come to the right place! These are great Halloween writing prompts, and some of these could also be used as suspense story prompts or dark fantasy story ideas.

These are all from my book 5 ,000 Writing Prompts: A Master List of Plot Ideas, Creative Exercises, and More . The book has 100 additional spooky writing prompts and horror story ideas, as well as master plots and idea starters for all kinds of writing.

If you are easily scared and have an over-active imagination, just skip this one. And anyway, just remember it’s all nonsense that I made up while I was exercising on the treadmill or sitting in bed.

Some of these are skeletal (ha) plot ideas, while others are images or suggestions. And if you’d like a spooky soundtrack to inspire you, be sure to check out my scary music playlist for writers ! Be sure to pin or bookmark the post for future reference. After all, when autumn rolls around, you might find yourself looking for Halloween writing prompts!

A musician practices. When she finishes a piece, she hears someone clapping for her, although she lives alone.
Frightening events in a small town lead its citizens to dig up the grave of a deceased inhabitant.
Someone gets on the elevator by himself and is never seen by his friends or family again.
The Furies—the vengeance deities of classic mythology—are back in business again.
A collector buys an unpublished manuscript by an obscure writer that describes a terrible historical event a year before it occurred. The collector learns the writer wrote many unpublished stories…
Creating a hybrid of a human and this particular animal turns out to be a bad idea.
A person has the ability to make other people very ill.
The dead walk out of the sea.
An individual begins seeing and hearing from someone who looks just like her – and learns she had a twin who died at birth.
A killer places an advertisement for a willing victim and finds one.
A basement contains jars filled with unusual specimens.
A person finds new photos of herself on her cell phone that she didn’t take.
The spirit of a brutalized slave or prisoner of war wants revenge on his tormentor’s descendants.
A couple vacationing in a remote area begins having the same nightmares.
All of the circus performers were killed in the train wreck.
The television switches to another station of its own accord and plays footage of something horrible that happened long before the technology existed to record it.
A spouse or sibling dies. He or she begins to take over the body of the surviving spouse or sibling.
Weekend adventurers explore a cave and can’t find their way out again. Then they encounter something terrible…
Authorities go through the cluttered apartment of a deceased man who lived alone with no known friends or relatives for decades and find something disturbing.
A group of teenagers trolls everyone else in an online group by telling made-up stories about terrible things they’ve done. Things then get out of hand.
It’s bad luck in the theatre to call the Shakespeare play Macbeth by name, but someone in the company keeps doing it anyway… and the superstition proves true.
Every exhibit in this carnival sideshow is fake. Except this one thing.
An individual develops a terror of water – drinking it, touching it, or even being near it. There’s actually a good reason why.
The grandfather clock starts running backwards.
People in this neighborhood begin having freak accidents that involve normal appliances and machinery, such as blenders, weed whackers, and garage doors.
The cure for a new deadly epidemic is almost scarier than the disease.
He locked the doors and shuttered the windows; it came in through the roof.
A woman is happy when her dead loved one comes back to life… but he’s changed.
This centuries-old beauty secret is effective but horrifying.
A killer toys with his victims by orchestrating a series of false hopes for them.
She wakes up in the middle of the night and runs out to a certain tree.
Tourists on a ghost tour, along with their guide, fall into the hands of an evil presence.
A young woman is impregnated by her handsome new boyfriend, who turns out to be something other than human.
The empty swing is swinging.
A bride on her honeymoon discovers she’s not her new husband’s first wife… not even close.
Long ago, when he was a baby, a man’s parents made an unwise deal in order to bring him back from the dead.
Members of a family or people in a town begin sleepwalking and doing strange things in their sleep.
A young man confesses to a killing that hasn’t happened. The murder he describes takes place while he’s in custody.
Grisly events happen after the arrival of a hypnotist in Victorian London.
An author’s fictional villain stalks him.
Fraternity hazing goes way too far.
It always happens when he’s alone in the car.
A patient in a mental hospital encounters a malevolent ghost, but nobody believes her.
A mother’s young child may or may not be a changeling.
Swarms of insects appear in various places in a town, always followed by an untimely death.
The ghost at the movie theater wants everyone to watch one particular snippet of film.
A child’s imaginary friend starts to cause real trouble.
When putting together a slide show for a wedding or funeral, someone notices that for decades, the same man, dressed in the same fashion, has been appearing in the background of photographs taken in public places.
A politician, religious leader, or celebrity exerts mind control over the will of his or her followers.
The fairy godmother isn’t the good kind of fairy.

Okay, I creeped myself out a little with these spooky writing prompts! If you’re writing a novel and want a step-by-step guide to planning, writing, and editing, be sure to check out my book 5,000 Writing Prompts .

5,000 WRITING PROMPTS: A Master List of Plot Ideas, Creative Exercises, and More | BRYN DONOVAN |

Do you have questions or suggestions about horror story ideas? We’d love to hear them in the comments section! And don’t miss future posts about writing. Follow my blog, if you aren’t already — there’s a place you can sign up below. Thanks so much for reading, and happy writing!

a notebook, scissors, pens, paper clips and other school supplies

Great prompts for the coming season and for those who write about the supernatural all year round. A friend of mine and myself send photos to each other as prompts and most of the time, mine stories lean toward the macabre, supernatural or fantasy. I love it! Many of these set my thoughts in motion (the gears are turning). Thanks!

Cheryl, that’s so cool that you and your friend send image prompts to each other! So glad you liked these. Thanks for the nice comments!

Those are delightful ideas and I thank you for them. Did you hear, by the way, about the writer of bizarre tales whose stories were typed using the blood font.The one that leaves an occasional trail of blood down the background image of the screen. Isn’t technology a delightful addition to this lexicon?

Hi Robert! Holy smokes, I had not heard of that use of text. That’s amazing! Thanks so much for commenting, and for the kind words!

I really like the first one: A musician practices. When she finishes a piece, she hears someone clapping for her, although she lives alone.

My character plays the violin and she’s blind, so imagining something like that happening is kind of scary.

Oh geez, Cinthia, that would be scary. That one was my favorite one, by the way. Thanks for commenting!

The reasons why crime features so heavily in media coverage are many and varied. In practical terms crime stories are often easy to cover, relative to other issues. Police make appeals for witnesses, ‘tip off’ journalists (sometimes in ethically problematic ways), court hearings are easy to access and scheduled long in advance.

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nice stories……..give me the creeps

Haha, thank you so much Jayitha!

Thanks so much really helped me.I have to write a short story for english so thanks!

So glad it helped, Neveah! Hope your story turned out (or turns out) great!

who are you?

That was amazing, I am 11 years old and I looked up writing prompts for fun but now I want to write a whole story! Thank you!

Thank u for these ideas. Good suggestions. I am actually writing a horror/thriller story right now and I’m almost done with it. It may be my first story to publish. At least I hope so. I hope that if it does get published, people may like it. I try to make my stories as unique as possible compared to the fantastic horror books already written.

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Great article…So, I have a very sketchy idea (comments welcomed).Newly married couple, husband starts having night terrors about being trapped/lost in a cave (the type extreme potholers go down). He suffers from claustrophobia, specifically potholing. The terrors become more and more violent until one day/night he wakes up inside a shaft, wedged between the walls by his broad shoulders…can’t go forward, can’t go backwards. That’s as far as I’ve got. Apart from skipping to a potential sad ending. You may have guessed that this is a fear of mine!!!

That is unbelievably terrifying!!

ps. You may also guess that I am attempting to write my FIRST book!!!

Thank you Ember Jay

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can you have more scary stories and pin them on pinterest? If you want my email for anything its [email protected] . Thanks

lisette isabelle

Isn’t the last one the plot of Shrek 2?????

yessss broooo

Broooo thats my fav movie!!!!!

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I like #4 The Furies—the vengeance deities of classic mythology—are back in business again. I’m currently writing a story about a demon and a school girl the story is call Her name was Misaki

This sounds like a a great story!

I used the first one to get me started on brainstorming, and I warped the idea into a feature screenplay that was very fun to write. Thanks for the awesome help!!!

Yeah boiiiiii

I was sitting by the window watching the snow slowly and silently fall. Suddenly, outside, a snap of a branch and a stutter of leaves, a sad old man leaves his house over the road. I watch him as he slowly strolls down the driveway with his brown old wooden stick. Is this a good story starter?

Thanks for getting my imagination running. I needed that. J

Aw, thanks. Thanks for reading, John!

heyo…. I’m 13 years old and i want to write a horror story…..this is helpful!!! I want to be an author when i grow up…whats it like being an author???!!! i have so many ideas , too many that i actually have no idea what to write this gave me some good ideas too thanks. oh, and i love your eyes they are so pretty.

Hey there! I’m so glad you liked the list! It sounds like you have an amazing imagination. Being a writer has challenges, but it’s fantastic making up whole characters, stories, and worlds…and when readers love your stories, too, that’s a great feeling. I hope you have great success as an author. Thanks for the compliment, too!

idea 48 is probably the ex boyfriend of the girl getting married and getting revenge on the husband hehe

I love all these prompts! They give just enough detail but also leave a great amount of imagination! I am doing a spooky story contest and now I have a wonderful idea! thank you so much! -Charlotte

Love this list! I plan on entering a short story contest, and this is very helpful! I lean more towards lengthy fantasy (particularly magic or medieval related) stories, so coming up with ideas for a scary short story is not exactly easy. I now have a solid idea combining bits and pieces of a few prompts (for example: #13 and #16) plus combining my own twists. So thank you!!

Thank you so much I really needed this for English

My story Wrote by 11 yrs old girl (no name, sry) The Mystery Of The Unexpected Ghost: As my grandfather lies on his deathbed, he told me of a terrible crime he committed many years ago and got away with. He also told me that his freedom was the result of a spell someone performed and that I should expect a visit from a ghost. “He will come out from the shadows,” are his last words. Hi, my name is Naomi. I am 21 years old and I love to read ghost stories especially Mr Midnight. I love spooky things like ghost but I do not wish to meet one, until one day, an unexpected man came and it changed my friend, Ruby’s and my life, FOREVER. It all started when I woke up one morning, “Hey! Want to hang out today? Let’s start working on our club, Daring Devils!” I called my friend, Ruby, over the phone. “Sure! I have no plans anyways…” Ruby answered. “Yay! Come over now!” I hung the phone and waited for Ruby to come. Moments later, “Ring… Ring…” The doorbell rang. I thought, ‘Yay it’s Ruby!’ When I opened the door, I saw Ruby and pulled her to my room. Then, I got super serious and asked her for cases to solve. “Nah, I have none, you?” Ruby said. I replied, “Actually, I do have one, but I think ghosts aren’t real…” “Wait, this case is about ghosts? Woo hoo! This just got a little more exciting!” Ruby exclaimed as she waited patiently for me to tell her the case. “Ok, so, before my grandfather died, he told me that I should expect a visit from a ghost.” I responded. “What, that’s not fun!” Ruby complained. I continued, “But that’s not all, after that, my grandfather told me that the ghost will come out from the shadows.” After hearing what I had said, Ruby’s face lit up and imitated a ghost, “WOOOOOOOOOOOOOO… So this is a mystery! Did your grandfather tell you when will the ghost appear?” “No…” I replied. “O…K… So we must predict when the ghost is coming…” Ruby said, trying to think when the ghost will come. I thought really hard that I thought my brain was going to explode and I suddenly said, “At night! Ghosts always appear at night!” “Ok, then, I’ll meet you at night, got to go, bye!” Ruby replied as she ran home. I sat patiently on my bed and waited for Ruby to come at night. I kept trying to sleep but thinking about the ghost kept me awake. “Ring… Ring…” the doorbell rang. I ran to the door, drag Ruby to my room and exclaimed, “Yay! This is going to be so fun!” Ruby answered, “Naomi, I’ll not get too excited if I were you…” “What, you scared of ghosts, I don’t even believe in them!” I responded. “Naomi! The ghost might be listening! Stop making fun!” Ruby warned me. “Whatever!” I blurted. Little did I know that the ghost was spying on us, listening to every word I said. “Let’s get started on the case!” I exclaimed as I turn on my computer and typed, ‘Ghosts that can perform spells.’ “Enter!” I said as I pressed enter. Once I pressed enter, lots of information from the internet popped up on the screen. I slowly browsed through each website. “Not this, not this and not this either! At this rate, we’ll never find out about that ghost” I whimpered, feeling hopeless. “Search, ‘Visit from a ghost who performs spells’.” Ruby replied immediately. I typed, ‘Visit from a ghost who performs spells.’ “Enter.” I uttered. Suddenly, there was only one website. I click on the website and it says: The Chancer * His real name is unknown. He is believed to be the ghost of a boy who never had a second chance. This ghosts helps humans in life. He gives chances to those who have a kind heart. If this ghosts visits you, you are lucky. But… if you do not have a kind heart, you will die! If you want to risk your life, then call him… Say, “Chance, chance, give me a chance. Everyone deserves a second chance.” If you did not call him but he came to you, means someone you knew had called him before… Beware of your surroundings, he will come out from the shadows. If you do not want him to come near you, say, “Chance, chance, I don’t need a chance. Everyone deserves a second chance, everyone but me, I’m done…” If you are expecting him to come, he will say, “Second chance, second chance, second, second, second chance… What would you like for your second chance? Tell me now, tell me now…” * (BOHH) “Gosh! Naomi, quick! Take a picture of it!” Ruby shook me. “Chill! ‘Kay, ‘kay!” I grumbled. I quickly took my phone and took a picture of it. “Anyways, what’s BOHH?” Ruby questioned me. “WHAT! You don’t know!? It means Blood On His Hands. He has taken a life. You should read Mr Midnight!” I responded. “So if you are not kind hearted and you called the ghost or if someone you know has called the ghost, you will die?” Ruby asked. “Yup!” I replied. “But I don’t need a second chance, do I?” I wondered. “I guess…” Ruby murmured. Unexpectedly, the lights suddenly off. “Second chance, second chance, second, second, second chance… What would you like for your second chance? Tell me now, tell me now…” said an unknown voice. “Who are you?” Ruby hollered. “I am The Chancer, would you like to have a second chance?” The voice said. “Uh… uh…” I stammered. I quickly turn on my phone and looked at the picture I took. I took a deep breath and said, “Chance, chance, I don’t need a chance. Everyone deserves a second chance, everyone but me, I’m done…” Once those words left my mouth, I heard a loud scream and the lights suddenly turned back on. “What just happened?” Ruby asked. “Am I dreaming? Pinch me, Naomi!” Ruby said. I pinched Ruby as hard as I could to get my revenge for her pinching me in the past. “Ouch! Stop!” Ruby screamed. “So, I’m not dreaming…” She said under her breath. Weeks past as I tried to forget the memories that haunt me. After a year, I called Ruby and asked, “Have you forgotten about The Chancer?” Ruby stammered, “I…I…I…I…” I asked impatiently, “So did you forget ‘bout it?” Ruby stammered again, “Ok, Naomi, I have to tell you this, don’t… freak… out, ‘kay?” “What is it?” I asked her curiously. “The Chancer… The Chancer has visited me…” Ruby answered me with a frightened look. “WHAT DID YOU SAID?!” I asked. “How many times must I repeat? The Chancer visited me!” Ruby shouted. “Oh! I understand everything now! If someone you know saw The Chancer, he will go to someone you know or someone you are really close with, or even you! I get it now!” I explained to Ruby. Then, I asked curiously, “But, what did you do when you saw The Chancer?” “Uh… Naomi, I forgotten what to say when The Chancer come, so I said I want a second chance!” Ruby replied me, feeling frightened. “What!” I hollered. “What is your second chance?” I asked. “My second chance is to be pretty!” Ruby answered, curling her hair and blushing at the same time. “But, you know that, err….” I said. “I know what?” Ruby asked. “You know that a second chance means, A SECOND LIFE, right?” I told her. “Oh no! I’m going to die? Please tell me I’m dreaming! Pinch me, please!” Ruby shouted. I pinched her cheek as hard as I could and she shouted. “Yup, definitely not dreaming!” Ruby said, as she touched her cheek. “HOW?!” Ruby shouted in horror. “Don’t ask me! Ask yourself!” I answered her with a furious look. “What am I supposed to do at this stage?” Ruby complained. “We’ll see… Let’s observe what will happen next…” I answered, feeling worried for Ruby. “We can have a sleepover at your house, YAY!” Ruby squealed. “Ugh…” I grumbled. “It’s midnight!” I said. “Be ready for what’s going to happen next!” I continued. Suddenly, Ruby was glowing. After a few moments later, she disappeared! Feeling afraid, I tried to sleep, but as expected, I could not. It was dawn and my eyes were still wide open. Unexpectedly, I heard someone screamed, “AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH” I shut my eyes and covered my ears. When I opened my eyes, I saw a very beautiful girl in front of me. “Get away from me!” I screamed. “Naomi, it’s me, Ruby!” she said. “Liar, then tell me something only Ruby and I know!” I screamed, feeling afraid. “There is someone called The Chancer and he came to visit me and you.” She continued. “Oh gosh, Ruby!” I hugged her and cried. “What happened to your face? You somehow became, prettier!” I asked curiously. “Oh… About that, err… The Chancer said it is only temporary. He said if I did not use this chance correctly, I will have consequences. But if I use it properly, I can keep it forever.” Ruby explained. “You sure? This doesn’t feel right.” I said, thinking about why The Chancer would let her keep it if she used it properly. “Stop talking nonsense… Do you always act like this?” Ruby talked with a little bit of sassiness. “We need to change your name to something prettier…” I suggested. “I agree. I kind of want to be named Naomi…” Ruby said. “Let me think of a prettier name than mine. Hmmm… How about Alexi?” I suggested. “That is so nice! Ok…” Ruby Alexi replied. The next day, I went to school with Ruby Alexi. When we entered, many people were staring at Alexi with their mouths wide open, even the prettiest girl in our school, Cindy. “Hey girl, what’s your name?” Cindy asked with A LOT of sassiness. “Ru… Alexi” Alexi said. “Why you hanging around with this nerd… What was her name again? Oh yes, Naomi.” Cindy said, pointing at me. “You are the real nerd! Stop being so mean you ugly girl and don’t act like you are so pretty, because you are NOT!” Alexi screamed at the top of her lungs. “OMG… I can’t believe such a pretty girl like you to be so mean,” Cindy flipped her hair and sashayed away. After Cindy left, a lot of guys started crowding around Alexi, asking her stuff like, “Are you single?” and “Want to hang out with me?” When Alexi saw them, she started flipping and curling her hair. “Psst… Remember to use your second chance properly. Stop flipping and curling your hair and get away from this crowd,” I reminded her. “Oh sorry people, I got to go… See you guys later!” Alexi told them and sashayed away. “Ugh…” I whispered under my breath. Many days past and Alexi acts the same every day. Until one day, something odd happened to her. She stopped doing the stuff she normally do. When we walked back home together from school, I asked her, “What happened to you?” “Something is about to happen… Something bad! I know it… The Chancer is going to remove my chance! Am I going to DIE?!” She answered, feeling afraid. “No you are not! Can you stay over at my house for today? I need to observe you…” I asked her. “Ok…” She immediately agreed and plastered a fake smile across her face. We reached my house and we waited until it was night time. “What now?” Alexi asked. “We’ll see,” I replied, staring at her. “This is getting awkward… I’m going back,” Alexi said, walking away from me. When she was walking, she suddenly fainted and disappeared, AGAIN! “Ugh… Not again!” I complained. This time, I thought she was dead as she did not appear for the past few weeks and her parents said she did not return. One night, when I was about to turn off the light, the light off itself. When I was about to scream, someone covered my mouth and I immediately fainted. When I woke up, I was tied up. I took a closer look at where I was and noticed it was a cemetery. “Mmmm!” I tried to scream but my mouth was taped. Suddenly, The Chancer appeared. “I mean no harm… I just have to warn you something,” he said. “Ruby… She… Is dead!” He continued. “It’s Alexi!” I reminded him. “You can’t call her Alexi!” he warned me. “Why?” I asked. “Just don’t.” he replied. “But why is she dead?” I asked. “I tried to warn her about something but The Devi got her!” He explained. “Who is The Devi?” I asked curiously. “She is my sister, or should I say, she was my sister. She has changed. She used to be a kind girl but now, I’m not really sure what has happened to her.” He said, staring at a grave. “Her grave, is at this cemetery. It is over there,” he said, pointing at the grave he was staring at previously. I looked closer at the name at it said, “RIP DEV ‘LOVE FOR ALL, HATRED FOR NONE’ MAY GOD BLESS MY FAMILY” “Oh, so that’s her grave. But, why would she kill Ruby? I mean what did Ruby did? And, how do you know Ruby is dead?” I asked curiously. “You will know soon… I must get going!” The Chancer disappeared after saying that. When he left, I started feeling dizzy and lied on the floor. Moments past and I woke up after dreaming of Ruby. I immediately went to my computer, went to the internet and typed, ‘The Devi’. When I press enter, there was lots of websites popped up. I clicked on the first website and it says: The Devi * Her real name is Dev. She is believed to be the ghost of a girl who was murdered. Some say she was murdered because of her doing something ridiculous. The story goes, when she was born, she was ugly. When she grew up, she realised that other girls were prettier than her. So she went to this ghost and asked the ghost to make her prettier, but unfortunately, the ghost killed her. The Devi kills people who asked The Chancer to be pretty for their second chance. Some survived her as The Devi thinks that they are not very pretty. If you survived her, you will be unlucky for the rest of your life! But if you are lucky enough, you will be lucky for the rest of your life. Beware of what you asked from The Chancer! If The Devi wants to meet you, you will glow and suddenly disappear. If you disappear once, you will definitely survive from her. If you disappear twice, it depends if The Devi wants you dead or alive. If you disappear thrice, you will definitely die from her! * (BOHH) The Chancer, click here “Oh no… So did Ruby died or what?!” I asked myself confusedly. I took out my phone and took a picture of it. Suddenly, I heard the same voice, “AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!” ‘Ruby! Are you there?” I asked. Ruby appeared again. I saw a lot of blood and scars on her body. “Oh my… What happened to you?” I asked her. “Hel… Hel… Help… Me… I-I-I a… am…” After saying that, Ruby fainted. After a few days, Ruby finally woke up. “What… What happened?” she asked curiously. “You disappeared as The Devi caught you.” I explained. “Who is The Devi? I only remember there was this extremely pretty girl talking to me.” Ruby asked, scratching her head. “What did she said to you?!” I asked her, waiting for her answer. “I only remember part of what she said. She said, ‘You will disappear again and it’s up to me to decide whether you should live or die… Hmm… I guess you can…’ Then I forgot what she said.” Ruby said, trying to remember what The Devi had said. “She would either said die or live.” I told Ruby. “How would you know?” Ruby asked. I took out my phone and showed her the picture about The Devi I took before Ruby appeared. Ruby read and screamed, “AAAAAAAHH! Oh no! She said I will disappear again, means I will definitely die!” “We might not know if the internet is true…” I said. “Yeah, you are right,” Ruby said. “I guess we have to wait until I disappear again…” Ruby continued. “No… I have a plan, but I’m not sure if it would work. But we might now know unless we give it a try!” I said. “So, what’s the plan?” Ruby asked. “Ok, we have to make Dev come out.” I said. “Err…” Ruby said, feeling confused. “We have to say something to piss her off.” I explained. “Like?” Ruby asked. “Just try to think… Let’s do it now.” I answered. “Hey Dev! Are you really that ugly? If you are, come out!” I shouted. “Err… Oh yeah, come on out unless you are afraid!’ Ruby shouted. Suddenly, Ruby was glowing. I hold her hand and we disappeared together. “Where are we?” I moaned. “Oh no! Naomi! Hel…” I heard Ruby said. I looked around and realised that I was in a cemetery, AGAIN! “Ruby?” I hollered. I looked around and spotted Ruby lying at a grave that said, “RIP DEV ‘LOVE FOR ALL, HATRED FOR NONE’ MAY GOD BLESS MY FAMILY” “Uh oh…” I whispered. I ran towards her and carried her up. Suddenly, The Devi appeared. “Wow, you guys are the first who dares to say cruel things to me, other than my brother and… and… wow!” she said. “Err…” Ruby and I said, feeling confused. “I saw that you, Naomi, searched about me on the website. You did not believed the internet and that is very smart of you… It is all a lie. Let me tell you my real story. So my real name is Dev. I was murdered by The Chancer, my brother, also known as Chace. He murdered me because I had something he did not have, popularity. The story goes, when I was born, I was extremely beautiful. A lot of boys always hang out with me but he was not popular. Chace was extremely jealous of me, so he killed me one day.” “Then…” I gasped. “Chace is evil! Oh my!” I screamed. Immediately, Chace appeared and slid Dev’s throat with his knife. “You betrayed me! You evil little creature, you will never get a second chance to live your popular life!” Chace screamed. “Look what we have here… Two girls. Well, Ruby, you want to be pretty right? Then you shall die too!” Chace continued, taking a sword about to kill Ruby. “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!” I screamed. I shut my eyes, thinking of how helpless I am right now. “Don’t you worry and thank you for being so kind to me…” I heard someone whispered to me. I slowly opened my eyes and saw Dev jumping in front of Ruby and defend her from the sword. A lot of things happened in a blink of an eye. Dev was sliced into half, Ruby fainted and Chace screamed, “DEV!” Chace ran towards Dev and sob. “I’m so sorry.” He said to Dev. “Oh no! Dev is dead!” I screamed and ran towards Chace and Dev. “Why did you kill her!? You are crazy!” I screamed at Chace. “I’m sorry.” He said with tears dripping off his face. “Since young, I have this illness. I will turn into someone crazy when I am jealous. But now, when I’m a ghost, I will turn into someone crazy when I give someone a second chance to be prettier.” He explained. “Then just remove the chance you gave Ruby!” I suggested. “Oh yeah! You are right!” he said with his eyes lit up, twinkling with delight. “Second chance, come to me, come to me and you shall die.” He said. After saying that, Ruby was glowing and her face turned to her own face. “Yes! It worked! Ruby, you are back!” I screamed. I took a look at Dev and she was also back to her normal self. Dev cried and thanked me then face Chace and apologise, “I’m sorry, I did not know…” “It’s alright!” Chase said. After that, life was back to normal and now, everyone is wondering where Alexi went, even Cindy. Before I sleep, Dev and Chase would always come and visit me and you will never guess what happens when they visit me…

Although James did not believe in ghosts, it was hard to dismiss the appearance and Disappearance of the girl in a white chiffon dress.

As my brother lay helplessly on his deathbed, I would only recall the memories of him talking about the tree of death. His last words were ‘beware of the undergrowth’.

Days and weeks passed since the tragic accident until I had enough of keeping the secret all to myself. From that point onward I knew both my life and Ella’s life would change…

It all started in the morning when I was deciding on which book from the series ‘GHOST OF MURDER’ I should read again. Then before I could tell what I was doing, I was moving automatically towards the telephone. Unknowingly, I started dialling the numbers 07345967781, it then came to my head that I was dialling the phone number of my friend Ella. Within seconds, the phone was received and that was when I started blabbering about the new club we started, called Devils Dare. Just like I expected she agreed enthusiastically.

Soon after Ella came, fully packed with all the necessities for the club. “Ugh…” I complained it was so annoying when Ella does not understand what I wanted to say. Then I started ambling towards her and started to mumble under my breathe” GHOSTS”! Then out of the blue “AAAAHHHHhhh”! screamed Ella in her usual high-pitched voice. Grabbing her by the wrist we fledged to my room.

There, Ella started complaining about how her wrist is broken and that its paining horribly. “What a cry-baby she is”. I said under my breathe ignoring and trying focus on what I called her here for. Ella stop, I did not mean to scare you. And do you remember my brother…. “Yeah of course I do”. Ella said in a very intense voice. Well before he died, he told me about a tree near Midview meadow was the tree of death. “WOW!!!!” whispered Ella.

Within a blink of an eye I saw Ella opening her laptop and was typing (exceptionally fast) about deaths occurring near the tree. My face then drained out of colour. I felt dumbfounded that I did not think of that earlier. We then only found one website which had the title DEATH…. the ghost of eternal darkness. It then occurred once we started reading the second paragraph, that each time someone dies at that very spot, they have a leaf fall on them and that is when they will evaporate into thin air.

Stunned by the news, we were really wanting to see if it was true. However, just before my very eyes Ella was being taken away from me by the shadows. Suddenly RING…. RING! OH! PHEW, I was dreaming.”. At one point, I had thought that all this a real dream until I realised that it was true, Ella had been taken! Running around in my room just like a headless-chicken I was really frightened until it came to me that my brothers last words were ‘beware of the undergrowth’.

It came to my mind that the undergrowth are the ghosts guarding the tree from the kind and letting the leaves on the ones who have a cold heart. Hurrying up to the tree I went to the very spot where the very people named on the website died. However, I never realised there was a test to pass. Although there was just one question (and that to the question being quite easy I quickly answered it).

As I slowly walked, there was a loud thud, which had made the ground make a little sound of pain. Running towards the core of the loud sound, I found Ella tied up with a misty rope. Fear took over me and without thinking, I noticed that I was at the exact spot where the ghost called death killed its victims. Hoping a leaf would not fall on me, I closed my eyes and wished. Though I unfortunately failed and I evaporated into thin air…

Within seconds I understood Deaths intelligence of luring me to be one of the victims. Abruptly, I found myself floating, I was a ghost!

“OH please, ghosts aren’t real and are never going to be”. James stammered. Who would believe in that. Though little did he know that he would be seeing the exact person at that exact place. Alas, the day arrived he then went with all his bravery to the Midview meadow and to his astonishment saw the last victim of the ghost Death. The next day back at school he started telling everyone about the disappearance and appearances of a ghost he had read, and he saw about. Though no one would ever believe him…

Title: The Stalker “Ring…” the bell rang. “Class dismissed!” Mrs. Ng said. “Amelia! Amelia! Wait for me, let’s walk home together.” Ari shouted. Amelia agreed and they walked home together. On their way home, “Creak…” Amelia turned behind and saw nothing but heard the wind blowing in the air. “BOOM!” When they heard the loud noise, they shouted and ran as fast as their legs could carry them. When they thought they were safe, Amelia stopped running and said, “What a relief! I could hear the loud boom just right beside my ears!” Ari panted and said, “Let’s just walk home and forget that just happened.” Amelia agreed and they continued walking home. Just when they were about to reach home, there was an unknown voice that whispered into Ari and Amelia’s ears. The voice said, “I’ll set you free when I get what I want.” Amelia shouted, “Reveal yourself!” So, the stalker revealed himself. He had spiky hair, tattoo all over his body, long claws as finger nails, a weird smile on his face and a scar on his eye. “My name is Klaus!” “Oh My Gosh!” Ari said it shockingly. Feeling afraid, Amelia whispered to Ari, “Let’s run away!” Ari nodded his head and they ran away. Before they could even move, Klaus use a metal pole and knocked them down. Klaus brought them to an abandoned house, tied their hands with ropes and taped their mouth with duct tape. When Amelia woke up, she mumbled, “Mmmm…. Mmmmm!” When Ari heard Amelia mumbling, she woke up. When Klaus saw Amelia and Ari woke up, he said, “Finally, you’re both awake. I’ve been waiting for an hour!” When he saw both of them were trying to talk, he removed the duct tape on their mouth. “Hey! What do you want?” Amelia shouted. Klaus said, “Money, obviously. Everyone wants money!” “Fine! Take it, release us and go!” Ari said. Klaus asked, “You sure?” “Yeah!” Ari replied. When Klaus was about to take the money, a siren sounded. Klaus shouted, “You called the police?” Amelia giggled and said, “Yeah, I called the police!” After hearing what Amelia had said, Klaus ran as fast as a cheetah. Ari asked Amelia, “Did you really called the police?” Amelia laughed and replied, “No, silly! That was my alarm! I am prepared for anything… Come on, let’s walk home!” s the saying goes, ‘Once bitten, twice shy’, Amelia taught Ari to be prepared for anything.

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Short horror story essay 8 Models

Last updated Friday , 15-03-2024 on 11:35 am

Short horror story essay is one of the popular intimidation methods that help parents in correcting children and improving their behavior in many educational aspects.

Through this article, we will provide you with many models that talk about stories of horror and intimidation that may help or influence the behavior of children, show the goals of horror stories, and the extent of the impact of these stories on improving children’s instincts, and strengthening their personality.

Short horror story essay

The school plays an important and significant role in educating children and improving their behaviour. In a similar article that talks about horror stories, the student can learn about the dimensions of these stories, the extent of their impact and why they are used.

The student can talk about his fears and terrifying situations he went through. The teacher can take advantage of these events and try to address these fears by guiding him and talking to him, or by making him research more about the dimensions of the problem and the benefits that he benefited from despite going through a terrifying situation.

At the beginning of the article we will put several points that show the goals that must be present within the topic, and several models will be created using these points inside them, so that the articles are useful for the student in case he wants to present them to the school, or if he wants to know the aspects that he should talk about inside a similar article he talks about the horror stories and the bad situations he was exposed to.

Objectives of the article

1- To obey orders.

2- Giving up bad behavior.

3- Repressing the evil instincts that are inside every human being.

4- Controlling the child in the safety zone next to the parents.

5- Planting correct means and methods through intimidation.

Several years ago, my father told me a story about a boy who went out without telling his family where he was going. And this was late at night. After he left, he met some children and played a little with them and enjoyed this, but because of the late time these children left him, some of them returned to their home alone, and some of them their families came to to pick them up, and he found himself alone in the end.

He decided to walk around for a while, so that he might encounter other children and continue playing with them. But after walking for a long time, he found that all the streets were empty, and it was dark everywhere, and he could no longer discern where he was, and that he was far from home and lost his way.

And whenever he tried to return from where he came, he found himself in dangerous areas with street dogs, and in order to avoid them, he kept entering other streets, until he lost the way completely. So he sat crying and did not find anyone to bring him home because all the people of the town were asleep.

The time at night was getting hard for this naughty little boy. Every minute that passes feels like it’s a long time and he’s so afraid of darkness and loneliness. And whenever he heard the sound of dogs howling, intensified in crying. And whenever he called his father, he did not come to take him, because he was far from the house and did not tell them that he was going out, and did not tell them where he was going.

Then he learned that he had made a big mistake and that his father would not come to look for him because he thought he was asleep. And he decided to try to call for help and search for any place where there are people and tell them what happened.

And he kept walking in the dark crying for a long time until he found some people, and told them his name, where he lived, and the name of the neighborhood in which he lived. Fortunately for him, they weren’t bad guys, and they brought this guy home.

The father was very angry with him for this behavior and punished him for a week for this behavior. But the boy was happy that he came home and learned the lesson well and knew that this wrong behavior was dangerous and could have lost his family for life.

While hearing this story, I was very afraid and put myself in the place of this boy, and I found myself learning from him what to do. And that I must tell my family where I am going, and watch the time, and take care of myself and not stay away from home. When I finish playing, I go home.

In the early morning, I was very careful to memorize my full name, the name of the neighborhood in which I live, the name of my mother, and the house number.

Although the story was scary for me, I learned a lot from it and had a reaction to every event that takes place in it.

Dear student, a basic form was submitted for the topic on short horror story essay, In addition to many other models such as, horror short story essay, creepy short horror story essay, a short horror story essay, short ghost story essay, short ghost story essay, scary short story essay, scary experience essay.

If you prefer to add any other topic, you can contact us through the comments of this article and we will study your request and add it as soon as possible.

horror short story essay

At the weekend I went on a trip with my friends to the forest. We took camping equipment, some food and water. The weather was nice, the trees were leafy, the birds were flying from tree to tree, the landscape was beautiful.

We wandered in the woods and ate the fruits on the trees, and as we wandered, a huge bear appeared in front of us, looked at us and prepared to attack us.

We were all very terrified, but the instructions reminded us not to run, not to scream, and to act calmly. I took out of my bag a self-defense spray bottle, which should be used in this case. But the bear left quietly and none of us were hurt.

creepy short horror story essay

I get up early and sit in the garden of the house, enjoying the fresh air, listening to the sound of birds, watching beautiful flowers and other beautiful landscapes, but yesterday something terrifying happened to me.

When I sat on the bench in the garden and was enjoying nature I felt something moving under the chair.

I quickly looked under the chair and found a large black snake.

It moves slowly, I felt very terrified and could not move, I remained frozen in my place, the snake crawled slowly and I looked at it with horror, until it moved away several meters, I called the competent authority immediately and a trained man came and caught the snake.

a short horror story essay

Last week I went with my family to the zoo, the weather was nice, and we were enjoying the nature, where there are a lot of green leafy trees and decorated with beautiful flowers and large areas that allow us to run and play, everything was beautiful.

Then we went to the animal cages and watched the animals from a distance.

But there is a person who got very close to the lion’s cage, even though there is a sign on it that says Do not go near the animal cages.

He was not satisfied with that, but he extended his hand into the cage, and the lion grabbed his hand with force, and this person was unable to rid his hand of the lion’s fangs.

The man screamed loudly from the severity of the pain, and the guard came quickly and tried to give the lion a piece of meat to leave the man’s hand, but to no avail.

The veterinarian quickly intervened and gave the lion an anesthetic injection, and the man was able to get his hand out of the cage, but it had many wounds and was taken to the hospital. It was really terrifying moments.

Short ghost story essay

There are many people who feel terrified in the dark, and my brother is very afraid of the dark and feels terrified and imagines frightening things.

So when the electricity went out and the house became dark. I went to his room quietly without feeling, and stood in front of him, making some strange sounds.

My brother jumped quickly and came out of the room saying a ghost of a ghost, but he hit the wall and cut his head and bled a lot, it was a big wound.

At that time I was telling him don’t be afraid, I am your brother, but he was very frightened. I was very sorry for him and regretted that I had caused him to feel terrified and made him crash into the wall.

And I told him I was just trying to joke with you and I wouldn’t do it again but you should train yourself not to be afraid of the dark.

A Short Scary Story Essay

Last weekend I went with my friends on a fishing trip. We chartered a fishing boat with all our fishing gear and went into the sea for a long distance, so that we could see neither the beach nor the city.

We started fishing and we were very happy because there are many fish and they are also big, and the weather was nice.

Suddenly strong winds blew and the waves rose, and the fishing boat was swinging with us over the water, up and down, and we couldn’t control it.

At this time we felt so afraid that we would drown.The fishing boat cannot withstand these bad weather conditions.

But after a while the wind calmed down a bit and we miraculously survived.

Scary short story essay

Last weekend I went with my colleagues on a school trip to one of the archaeological sites, and we had some teachers with us organizing the trip and supervising our transfers.

We entered a museum that houses great antiquities and stood listening to the tour guide talking about the history of these antiquities.

I was fascinated and listened to the tour guide with great interest, so that I did not feel the departure of my colleagues and teachers, as they left the museum and got on the bus and left this place and did not feel my absence.

When I found myself alone in the museum, I felt very afraid and searched for them all over the museum, but I could not find them, so my fear increased and my crying became louder.

Suddenly I found one of the teachers entering the museum and looking for me, so I ran towards him and grabbed his hand and felt safe.

Scary Experience Essay

At the end of the year I had a frightening experience. I went to the beach and decided to snorkel, so I bought wetsuits, put them on, and dived into the sea. But it was not what I expected and almost drowned.

I was so scared when I found myself unable to dive, and could not swim to the top.

It was a difficult situation but one of the lifeguards on the beach saw me, knew I was going to drown and ran to save me.

Therefore, I advise others to learn before we do anything that might endanger our lives.

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How to Write a Ghost Story

Last Updated: March 4, 2024 Fact Checked

This article was co-authored by Grant Faulkner, MA . Grant Faulkner is the Executive Director of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and the co-founder of 100 Word Story, a literary magazine. Grant has published two books on writing and has been published in The New York Times and Writer’s Digest. He co-hosts Write-minded, a weekly podcast on writing and publishing, and has a M.A. in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources. This article has been viewed 221,432 times.

Many people enjoy a good ghost story and writing your own can be just as enjoyable. Ghost stories generally follow the patterns of other fictional work, focusing on a character and their encounters with a challenging force or event. However, ghost stories have a close focus on evoking feelings of terror and dread, building them up into a horrifying climax. Learning some of the ideas and techniques behind good ghost stories can help you create your own terrifying tales.

Developing Your Plot

Think about which situations meeting a ghost would be most terrifying.
Imagine the details of the ghost and how it haunts you, noting what scares you the most.
Try watching your favorite horror films or reading other ghost stories to get inspired.

What locations do you find disturbing or discomforting?
Your setting should have a feeling of isolation, cutting the main characters off from help.

Step 3 Brainstorm ideas and plan your story arc.

Stasis. This is the introduction to your story and it demonstrates the normal life of your characters.
Trigger. This event is something that pushes your character out of their normal life.
Quest. This is where your character is given a goal or something they must do.
Surprise. This will take up the middle section of your story and will be the events along the way towards your heroes goal.
Critical choice. Your protagonist will need to make a hard choice that demonstrates their character.
Climax. This is the moment your story was building up to and the most dramatic moment of the story.
Reversal. This should be the consequence to your character's critical choice or the main challenge.
Resolution. This point is where your characters return to everyday life but are changed from the ordeal.

Write your outline in a chronological ordering of events.
Don't leave any gaps in the narrative for your outline.
Try to think about each scene and examine how they work together.
If writing an entire ghost story seems overwhelming at first, try writing a 100-word ghost story to warm up. You get 100 words to write something truly creepy and unsettling. It takes less time, and you won't have to worry as much about outlining and pacing.

Don't rush to reveal the confrontation or climax of your ghost story.
Building the tension of the story slowly can make the climax even more intense.

Developing Your Characters

Try to think of why your character is in the situation they are.
Imagine how your character would react to the events in your story.
Try to get a clear mental picture of what your character looks like.

Your ghost will need a reason or motive for existing and doing what they do.
Ghosts come in different forms, being more or less physical or having different powers.

Step 3 Consider working on foils or additional characters.

Foils usually have different personalities than the main characters in order to highlight the individual characteristics.
Your supporting characters should also have their own unique qualities and personalities.
Ask yourself what relationships these characters might have with the main characters of your ghost story.

Writing Your Ghost Story

Step 1 Avoid telling the reader what's happening.

”The ghost appeared and I was frightened” is an example of telling the reader what's happening.
”The ghost appeared and my stomach tightened up in knots. I could feel my face break out in a sweat and my heart trying to leap out from my chest.” is an example of showing the reader what's happening.

Step 2 Make your readers fill in the details.

For example, “The ghost was ten feet tall and exactly as wide as the door that it came through.” is probably too direct.
Try saying something like “The ghost was enormous, making the room suddenly feel claustrophobic and tight.”

Consider ending your story in a single sentence.
Offering too much explanation at the end of your ghost story can lessen the impact of your ending.

Community Q&A

Think about what scares you the most and let those fears inspire your ghost story. Thanks Helpful 3 Not Helpful 0
Have a clear understanding of what and who your characters are. Thanks Helpful 3 Not Helpful 0
Setting is an important part of your ghost story that can either enhance or detract from the feelings of terror you are trying to evoke. Thanks Helpful 4 Not Helpful 1

Tips from our Readers

You don't have to write about a human ghost. Try writing about a ghost animal or some other supernatural being.

Things You'll Need

Pen or pencil

↑ https://www.writersdigest.com/there-are-no-rules/the-horror-genre-on-writing-horror-and-avoiding-cliches
↑ https://www.writers-online.co.uk/how-to-write/how-to-write-a-ghost-story/
↑ http://www.dailywritingtips.com/how-to-structure-a-story-the-eight-point-arc/
↑ https://www.writersdigest.com/write-better-fiction/7-steps-to-creating-a-flexible-outline-for-any-story
↑ https://atomlearning.com/blog/6-ways-to-build-suspense-and-tension-in-writing
↑ https://mythcreants.com/blog/three-ways-you-can-use-description-to-mess-with-your-readers/

About This Article

To write a ghost story, start by thinking about what you find scary about ghosts. Additionally, since atmosphere plays a large part in ghost stories, imagine the creepiest location you can think of for the setting. Next, work on your story’s arc, which includes the introduction, the climactic moment, and the resolution. As you draft your story, think about what you want to show your reader and what you want to leave up to their imagination, since readers will automatically fill in details with their own mind. To learn how to finish your ghost story, keep reading! Did this summary help you? Yes No

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How to Write a Ghost Story

How to write a ghost story: point of view and choice of tense.

One of the first things to do when deciding how to write your ghost story, is to choose a point of view. There are many writing books written on point of view and tense, but here are my thoughts:

Your primary aim is to create a chill. You need to get the reader feeling along with the main character as that person makes his or her way through the story. Because of this many ghost stories are written in the first person. ‘I hear a noise…’ ‘My heart thumps in my chest..’

You will see that I have gone into first person present tense. There is such a thing as the narrative present and when telling stories in ordinary life, people will start to relate an incident in the present tense. For example:

I was walking down this road, then I see a car coming at me. I jump out the way, and I hit a telegraph pole. The car drives off without even stopping. But it was okay. I wasn’t hurt.

Tony Walker, a few minutes ago.

Writing a whole novel in the present tense is fashionable at the moment. If you look back at classic stories, very few were written in the present, but go now (I command you!) to your local bookstore, pick up the new best-selling novels, and a good number of those will be in the present tense.

Carmilla by J Sheridan Le Fanu is written in the first person, present tense because it is supposed to reflect the main character (or protagonist) Laura writing in her journal for Dr Hesselius.

*In Styria, we, though by no means magnificent people, inhabit a castle, or schloss. A small income, in that part of the world, goes a great way. Eight or nine hundred a year does wonders. Scantily enough ours would have answered among wealthy people at home. My father is English, and I bear an English name, although I never saw England. But here, in this lonely and primitive place, where everything is so marvellously cheap, I really don’t see how ever so much more money would at all materially add to our comforts, or even luxuries.

Carmilla, Chapter 1

However, within the same chapter, Le Fanu slips into the first person past tense. Whether this is intentional or accidental, it’s hard to say. Certainly doing that would earn him condemnation from modern writing coaches and intense slagging off in fiction writing online fora.

I and my father constituted the family at the schloss. My mother, a Styrian lady, died in my infancy, but I had a good-natured governess, who had been with me from, I might almost say, my infancy. I could not remember the time when her fat, benignant face was not a familiar picture in my memory.

It’s fair to say that writing in the past tense is the traditional way to compose a story.

Classic ghost stories were more than not, written in the third person. That is to say,

He walked the long passageway, his footsteps echoing among the serried suits of armour.

Tony Walker, just now

But the choice of past tense over present tense, is not such a hard and fast rule as choosing first person over third person. I would go so far as to say that there are very few ghost stories written before 2000 that use the present tense, but nearly half use the first person point of view and probably just over half use the third person.

You can argue that using first person makes a story experience more immediate, so why wouldn’t you always use it? Why would you ever pick the third person?

There is a reason and this goes to my distinction between a ghost story and a horror story. Very often, most usually, the main character in a ghost story survives. They may be shaken or they may be uplifted by their supernatural experience, but by and large, they survive. However, in a horror story, there is a good chance they will come to a bad end.

In this case, how did they communicate the story to you? Now, we all know this is a fiction. It never happened, but for some reason we like to stick to the convention that we are being told a story ‘as if’ it really happened, and if it really happened, and the geezer in it died, then how come he’s telling it to the audience?

One way I got round this, was by having the main character type it up on his computer, and there the story was blinking on the screen, awaiting a reader. (Luckily the monster didn’t smash it up.) This is a modern version of the epistolary horror story. Dracula is an epistolary story in that it is told in letters and journal entries. Heck, there’s even a sub-genre called Epistolary Horror

But an easier rule for how to write a classic ghost story, is to write in the third person from the point of view of an all-seeing narrator: the voice in the sky, who sees everything, even in locked rooms. This does create a little distance between your audience and your main character, but it saves you having to explain how anyone found out about the horrific incident.

How to Write A Ghost Story: Make the Environment Hostile

What don’t people like? Cold, rain, snow, dark, being lost, an environment where you can’t see very far or your movement is hampered like a marsh or a forest. Yes, make your audience shiver and pine with the protagonist as he or she gets more and more desperate, is separated from all help, and gets colder and more scared. The thing is you have to create a plausible reason why the protagonist gets themselves into this fix. If you simply have them go to the attic in the killer clown’s house, people will ask: really?

In Amelia Edward’s The Phantom Coach , our man gets lost on the moors of Northern England, the snow is falling, the light is fading. But he’s been out shooting so he has good reason to have got himself into this pickle.

Well! It was just twenty years ago, and within a day or two of the end of the grouse season. I had been out all day with my gun, and had had no sport to speak of. The wind was due east; the month, December; the place, a bleak wide moor in the far north of England. And I had lost my way. It was not a pleasant place in which to lose one’s way, with the first feathery flakes of a coming snowstorm just fluttering down upon the heather, and the leaden evening closing in all around. I shaded my eyes with my hand, and stared anxiously into the gathering darkness, where the purple moorland melted into a range of low hills, some ten or twelve miles distant. Not the faintest smoke-wreath, not the tiniest cultivated patch, or fence, or sheep-track, met my eyes in any direction. There was nothing for it but to walk on, and take my chance of finding what shelter I could, by the way. So I shouldered my gun again, and pushed wearily forward; for I had been on foot since an hour after daybreak, and had eaten nothing since breakfast.

The Phantom Coach, by Amelia Edwards

He has every good reason to be lost, and he’s hungry too!

In Frank Cowper’s Christmas Eve on a Haunted Hulk our protagonist goes hunting duck in a dreary marshland. He finds a derelict ship, clambers aboard and then loses his boat and is marooned!

*What could have caused the splash, that luckless splash, I wondered. There was surely no one else on board the ship, and certainly no one could get out here without mud-pattens or a boat. I looked round. All was perfectly still Nothing broke the monotony of the grey scene–sodden and damp and lifeless. A chill breeze came up from the southwest, bringing with it a raw mist, which was blotting out the dark distance, and fast limiting my horizon. The day was drawing in, and I must be thinking of going home. As I turned round, my attention was arrested by seeing a duck-punt glide past me in the now rapidly falling water, which was swirling by the mud-bank on which the vessel lay. But there was no one in her. A dreadful thought struck me. It must be my boat, and how shall I get home? I ran to the stern and looked over.The duck-punt was gone.The frayed and stranded end of the painter told me how it had happened. I had not allowed for the fall of the tide, and the strain of the punt, as the water fell away, had snapped the line, old and rotten as it was. I hurried to the bows, and jumping on to the bitts, saw my punt peacefully drifting away, some quarter of a mile off. It was perfectly evident I could not hope to get her again.

Christmas Eve on a Haunted Hulk, Frank Cowper

There Must be a Gothic Building!

In Carmilla, the Gothic focus is the traditional castle, suitably set in a forest.

Over all this the schloss shows its many-windowed front; its towers, and its Gothic chapel.Nothing can be more picturesque or solitary. It stands on a slight eminence in a forest. The road, very old and narrow, passes in front of its drawbridge, never raised in my time, and its moat, stocked with perch, and sailed over by many swans, and floating on its surface white fleets of water lilies.The forest opens in an irregular and very picturesque glade before its gate, and at the right a steep Gothic bridge carries the road over a stream that winds in deep shadow through the wood. I have said that this is a very lonely place. Judge whether I say truth. Looking from the hall door towards the road, the forest in which our castle stands extends fifteen miles to the right, and twelve to the left. The nearest inhabited village is about seven of your English miles to the left.

From Carmilla by J Sheridan Le Fanu

In Charlotte Riddell’s The Open Door the Gothic habitation is an old abandoned English mansion.

*It was a long avenue, but at length I stood in front of the Hall–a square, solid-looking, old-fashioned house, three stories high, with no basement; a flight of steps up to the principal entrance; four windows to the right of the door, four windows to the left; the whole building flanked and backed with trees; all the blinds pulled down, a dead silence brooding over the place: the sun westering behind the great trees studding the park. I took all this in as I approached, and afterwards as I stood for a moment under the ample porch; then, remembering the business which had brought me so far, I fitted the great key in the lock, turned the handle, and entered Ladlow Hall.For a minute–stepping out of the bright sunlight–the place looked to me so dark that I could scarcely distinguish the objects by which I was surrounded; but my eyes soon grew accustomed to the comparative darkness, and I found I was in an immense hall, lighted from the roof, a magnificent old oak staircase conducted to the upper rooms.The floor was of black and white marble. There were two fireplaces, fitted with dogs for burning wood; around the walls hung pictures, antlers, and horns, and in odd niches and corners stood groups of statues, and the figures of men in complete suits of armour.

The Open Door , Charlotte Riddell

In Christmas Eve on a Haunted Hulk the gothic habitation is the haunted ship.

The old vessel lay nearly upright in the soft mud, and a glance soon told she would never be used again. Her gear and rigging were, all rotten, and everything valuable had been removed. She was a brig of some two hundred tons, and had been a fine vessel, no doubt. To me there is always a world of romance in a deserted ship. The places she has been to, the scenes she has witnessed, the possibilities of crime, of adventure–all these thoughts crowd upon me when I see an old hulk lying deserted and forgotten–left to rot upon the mud of some lonely creek.

Christmas Eve on a Haunted Hulk

And we see here that the derelict ship, like Carmilla’s schloss, has an air of adventure and mystery. There is something romantic about it, and so the Gothic habitation must have the horrible and the enchanting about it. They are in fact fairy habitations, no matter how disguised.

One of the most disguised Gothic Habitations and therefore most ingenious, appears in The Old Portrait by Hume Nisbet. Here the Gothic habitation containing the horrific, dangerous but sensually alluring vampiress is an old picture frame.

The frame, also, I noticed for the first time, in its details appeared to have been designed with the intention of carrying out the idea of life in death; what had before looked like scroll-work of flowers and fruit were loathsome snake-like worms twined amongst charnel-house bones which they half covered in a decorative fashion; a hideous design in spite of its exquisite workmanship, that made me shudder and wish that I had left the cleaning to be done by daylight.

The Old Portrait by Hume Nisbet

In Cynthia Asquith’s The Corner Shop , The Gothic Habitation as I am calling it, is the antique shop. In H G Well’s Magic Shop , it is the Toyshop. The Gothic habitation must be set apart from the world. It is an unusual place, not normally encountered and it may be terrifying or enchanting or both.

The message here when considering how to write a ghost story, is to put in a place or object that is fires the imagination of your reader, and transports them to the realm of Faerie. Because that’s what we’re doing after all.

As they say in that classic story, Lud in The Mist the country folk do not clearly distinguish between fairies and the dead. They are both called The Silent People, and ghost stories are in fact a kind of fairy story, where otherworldly denizens come to teach humans about right and wrong, even where they themselves give a bad example.

A Classic Ghost Story Needs Lots of Description

The glade through which we had just walked lay before us. At our left the narrow road wound away under clumps of lordly trees, and was lost to sight amid the thickening forest. At the right the same road crosses the steep and picturesque bridge, near which stands a ruined tower which once guarded that pass; and beyond the bridge an abrupt eminence rises, covered with trees, and showing in the shadows some grey ivy-clustered rocks.Over the sward and low grounds a thin film of mist was stealing like smoke, marking the distances with a transparent veil; and here and there we could see the river faintly flashing in the moonlight.

Carmilla, Chapter 2

A Classic Ghost Story Needs a Monster In The Shadows

M R James believed that ghost stories erred when they were too blatant. That meant being too obvious with their monster. The scriptwriters among you may be familiar with the late Blake Snyder’s manual on Scriptwriting called Save The Cat . It’s a must read book really, but one of the story templates Monster In The House , encapsulates most ghost and horror stories. Think of the Sci Fi movie Alien – the monster in the starship. For a good part, and probably the most effective part, of the movie, we do not see the monster. In the recent horror movie The Ritual, again, for the best part of the movie, we do not see the monster.

In classic ghost stories, most of the time we do not see the monster. In Algernon Blackwood’s The Kit Bag

the scariest effects are the sounds and sensations of the thing unseen on the stairs. In Christmas Eve on a Haunted Hulk the ghost action is never seen because it’s pitch dark, but we hear and feel the effect of the ghost. A fantastically effective modern ghost story, Michelle Paver’s Dark Matter , takes place in the Arctic Winter when it is dark all the time. We are aware of something moving in the dark, but we can’t see it.

In A M Burrage’s Smee , the twelve guests are playing hide and seek in the dark in a large house, when they realise there are thirteen people playing. One of them is dead.

The classic ghost stories that have supernatural things crawling around in the dark, often end with the protagonist being a mere witness to the supernatural occurrence. The problem with that is that it lessens the threat for the protagonist, and decreases the dramatic tension, so decreasing the scare effect for the reader.

I guess, as in most modern stories, the monster has to emerge from the darkness towards the end and actually threaten the characters.

One story where the tension is built in the dark, and the threat is real, only illuminated at the end when the lights go on, is Ray Bradbury’s The October Game . Strictly speaking this is a horror story rather than a ghost story.

So when writing your ghost story, I would suggest you keep the monster off-stage until the final denouement.

A Classic Ghost Story Needs Foreshadowing

The set-up is a large part of a ghost story. We have talked about a hostile environment, to put the main character far from help. Then we have him encounter the gothic habitation, the place that the wonders will take place: a setting quite extraordinary. In both of these sections we will see a lot of description using all the senses.

Meanwhile, the snow began to come down with ominous steadiness, and the wind fell. After this, the cold became more intense, and the night came rapidly up. As for me, my prospects darkened with the darkening sky, and my heart grew heavy as I thought how my young wife was already watching for me through the window of our little inn parlour, and thought of all the suffering in store for her throughout this weary night.

The Phantom Coach

Ideally, we are going to draw on all the senses to put our reader in that extraordinary place.

The afternoon was closing in, and the hall, which had no fire lighted in it, looked dark and gloomy; but we did not stay there a moment. The old servant, who had opened the door for us, bowed to Mr. Henry, and took us in through the door at the further side of the great organ, and led us through several smaller halls and passages into the west drawing-room, where he said that Miss Furnivall was sitting. Poor little Miss Rosamond held very tight to me, as if she were scared and lost in that great place; and as for myself, I was not much better. The west drawing-room was very cheerful-looking, with a warm fire in it, and plenty of good, comfortable furniture about.

The Old Nurse’s Story

‘One foggy evening, at the end of a day of enforced idleness in my chambers – I had just been called to the Bar – I was rather dejectedly walking back to my lodgings when my attention was drawn to the brightly lit window of a shop. Seeing the word “Antiques” on its sign-boar, and remembering that I owed a wedding present to a lover of 4 bric-à-brac, I grasped the handle of the green door. Opening with one of those cheerful jingle-jangle bells, it admitted me into large rambling premises, thickly crowded with all the traditional treasure and trash of a curiosity shop. Suits of armour, warming-pans, cracked, misted mirrors, church vestments, spinning-wheels, brass kettles, chandeliers, gongs, chess-men – furniture of every size and every period. Despite all the clutter, there was none of the dusty gloom one associates with such collections. Far from being dingy, the room was brightly lit and a crackling fire leaped up the chimney. In fact, the atmosphere was so warm and cheerful that after the cold dank fog outside it struck me as most agreeable.

The Corner Shop

But a large part of the job is to place information early on that seems unremarkable enough, but which is essential to the unfolding plot and particularly the ending. The Russian playwright, Chekov famously said that everything that has no place in the story should be removed, and only objects that are necessary to the plot should remain. This cues up an object and the wily reader will know that if Chekov mentions a pistol in Act I, it will be used by the end of the play.

August Heat does this in that we know that when:

A sudden impulse made me enter. A man was sitting with his back towards me, busy at work on a slab of curiously veined marble. *

August Heat

That this piece of marble will be relevant. As indeed it is.

A Classic Ghost Story Needs Misdirection

Not all ghost stories do that, but it is something that readers love. Misdirection is the main card played by writers of crime fictions. You place the pistol in Act I, and the experienced reader thinks, ‘Aha!’ that will be relevant by the end. The fun thing is confounding the expectation of the reader so that it is relevant in an unexpected way.

For example in the Corner Shop, we are introduced to a grey-faced man who we are led to believe right through the story that he is one of the servants. And, then at the very end it transpires that we, and the protagonist have been wrong about that in a way that suddenly illuminates the central point of the story.

‘“Meet him?” she echoed in amazement as the footsteps neared. ‘“Yes, I may stay and see your father, mayn’t I? I heard your sister say he would soon be here.” ‘“Oh, now I understand!” she exclaimed. “You mean Bessie’s father! But Bessie and I are only step-sisters. My poor father died years and years ago.”’

One classic misdirection, often found in ghost stories is central to M. Night Shyalam’s Sixth Sense where famously at the end, Bruce Willis’s character realises that it is he who is the ghost. We find this in On The Brighton Road , where the tramp perhaps never realises he’s dead, though the reader does finally twig this at the end. This is a common motif in ghost stories, that of the dead not realising they are dead, and in fact I have used it myself, to good effect. Though it seems corny, when I’m doing a live reading of this particular story: The Hitcher (to be found in this collection Cumbrian Ghost Stories I always hear the ‘oh!’ from the audience and that makes me feel warm inside. Unlike the main character of The Hitcher.

When you are considering how to write a ghost story, I would urge you to consider this simple trick. After all, as it is often said, the oldies are the goodies!

To Be Classic A Ghost Story Needs a Moral Message

Since Biblical times, ghosts have returned to the living with the exhortation to do good and eschew evil. Sometimes they urge revenge, such as Hamlet’s father’s ghost in Shakespeare’s play of that name. Sometimes they come to accuse murderer’s as does Banquo’s ghost in Macbeth , but usually they are very concerned with right and wrong among the living, and redressing the moral balance.

When you’re thinking about how to write a ghost story, though there are many ghost stories written without a moral message, the audiences love to have their sense of right and wrong tickled, so whether you have your ghost urge revenge, punish the wicked or reward the good (after a little struggle obviously), put in a morally acceptable message. Good should prevail if you want to keep those One Stars at bay.

Please note, the book links to Amazon are affiliate links and if you buy from them I get a small commission.

Irish Ghost Stories

Taig O’Kane and The Corpse Written by Douglas Hyde This story is also known as Tadhg O’Kane or Ó Catháin. An Irish ghost story, or perhaps an Irish fairy story, where a wastrel boy compromises the reputation of a local girl and when he goes out on the road to think, he meets a party…

The House and The Brain, or The Haunters and The Haunted by Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Join Tony as we explore Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s classic short story, ‘The House & The Brain’. This captivating tale, first published in 1859, follows a narrator as he investigates the strange occurrences in a haunted house. The story is notable for its suspenseful atmosphere, its examination of the power of the human mind, and its timeless…

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All Hallows by Walter de la Mare

All Hallows by Walter de la Mare Link to the Audio Version of All Hallows Brief Biography of Walter de La Mare Walter de La Mare (1873-1956) was an English poet, novelist, and short story writer known for his imaginative and evocative works. Born on April 25, 1873, in London, de La Mare began writing…

Harry by Rosemary Timperley

Harry by Rosemary Timperley Thank you to Steve Cuff for suggesting I read this story. Rosemary Timperley was born in 1920 in North London and died in November 1988. Her father was an architect and her mother a teacher. Timperley went to her local girls school and became a teacher herself. She taught English and…

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On the Most Adapted Ghost Story of All Time

Adam scovell looks into the cinematic appeal of henry james’s turn of the screw.

Ghost stories are about seeing. If their earnest intention in simplistic terms is to scare, then that fear first and foremost arises from witnessing. Seeing becomes séance in tales of the supernatural. In the history of the literary ghost story, several writers have taken the form to its zenith through terrifying temporal lapses of perception. Those glimpsed stories of M.R. James’s or those witnessed horrors of Charles Dickens; all stories in which the act of seeing becomes the spine of the narrative.

With this in mind, it’s clear to see why several of the strongest ghost stories of the last two hundred years or so have found their way onto screens in various forms. With the act of seeing so pivotal to their narrative arcs, there is an obvious visual quality within them that renders their potential for screen adaptation irresistible. It could almost be argued that the most adapted of writers and their stories are those that convey this visual terror most effectively.

M.R. James is likely the most adapted of ghost story writers (perhaps with some competition from Algernon Blackwood), in terms of the sheer number of different stories that have made it onto the screen. An upcoming adaptation of his story The Mezzotint is due to be screened at Christmas this year on the BBC. In terms of singular stories, one of the most adapted is arguably Dickens’s A Christmas Carol , partly (like James) due to its firm position within Christmas tradition.

One story above all is returned to again and again by filmmakers across countries and eras, suggesting that it may be the most visually alarming of all English language eerie tales. That story is Henry James’s 1898 novella, The Turn of the Screw .

The novella follows the haunted and disturbing events at a manor in Bly, Essex. A group of men are being read a manuscript authored by a governess who was charged with the care of the children of the manor, Miles and Flora. Miles has been mysteriously expelled from school and returns home. The governess becomes increasingly unnerved by their behavior and the presence of a man and a woman seen variously around the property. They are said to be the spirits of the previous governess Miss Jessel and her lover Peter Quint. Soon, the governess suspects liaisons between the ghosts and children, her investigations resulting in horror and tragedy.

James’s heady novella is arguably the most successful ghost story ever written, at least in terms of creative responses to it. A cursory glance over IMDb entries reveals over two dozen screen adaptations, and that’s before including filmed versions of the chamber opera of the story by composer Benjamin Britten.

In particular, the last two decades have seen a slew of television adaptations, 2020 itself boasting no less than six screen versions of various kinds. Even this year, there have already been two adaptations, and filmmakers seem to sleepwalk into recreating it in the same somnambulist fashion as the children of the narrative; possessed of spirits older and darker than themselves.

Out of the many adaptations, Jack Clayton’s 1961 version is considered the benchmark. The film celebrated its 60th anniversary this year, having premiered in London on the 24th of November, 1961. Considering the sheer number of competitors to Clayton’s version, it is telling of the film’s qualities that it still stands far and above its many peers. In fact, it is difficult to see James’s story without those stark black-and-white images of the film coming to mind, as well as its stunning central performance by Deborah Kerr. Suffice to say, 60 years on, Jamess’ screen ghosts still haunt.

The Turn of the Screw has the sort of ambiguous ghostly heritage expected of such a celebrated tale. James was acquainted with another noted exponent of the English ghost story, E.F. Benson. Benson’s father Edward White Benson was the Archbishop of Canterbury and, on a visit to his house in 1895, the archbishop purportedly told James a story. The story was one vaguely similar to the narrative he was soon to produce, in which two children were left in the care of ill-suited servants, both of whom died and haunted the children, corrupting them even from the grave.

Roger Clarke, the author of The Natural History of Ghosts , has researched the story’s history thoroughly and highlighted the murky contradictions within its possible inspirations. “The general scholarly view is that The Turn of the Screw is not based on any known story but,” he writes, “in fact, the story recounted one January evening at the archbishop’s house in Addington…” Clarke sees some connection to the famous haunting of Hinton Ampner and its occupant Mary Ricketts, perhaps passed down through the upper echelons of society to the archbishop. He does stress, however, that E.F. Benson, along with the archbishop’s wife, could never recall the man recounting such a ghost story.

The novella was originally published by Collier’s Weekly in a 12-part serial form in 1898 between January and April. Tellingly, the visual potential of the narrative was already understood by the publishers who commissioned several pieces of artwork for each instalment, with title illustrations by John La Farge and episode illustrations by Eric Pape. Looking back on the visual culture surrounding James’s story, it’s easy to see the influence these drawings had on future adaptations. One illustration by Pape, entitled “I must have thrown myself, on my face, on the ground” looks like a possible piece of storyboard for Clayton’s later film.

James’s story quickly garnered critical interpretation. In particular, the deeply disturbing undertones of sexuality, as well as possible psychological implications of the ghosts’ presence, came to the fore in a number of well known analyses.

Virginia Woolf was particularly intrigued, and aptly turned to James’s investigation of perception to explore the undertones of his story and its fine line between inner demons and the physical body. In an essay for The Times Literary Supplement she wrote that James’s characters “…with their extreme fineness of perception are already half-way out of the body.”

The horror of James’s story is that seeing ghosts doesn’t necessarily mean a visitation of them to our world, but of the perceiver into theirs. We are midway towards death in seeing a ghost, within a momentary halfway house which we can either step back from or descend into.

Similarly to Woolf, in one of the most famous analyses of James’s story, the critic Edmund Wilson went further in determining the ghosts to be of the governess’ own psyche. Wilson was far less positive in his mildly infamous critique of James in a 1934 issue of Hound and Horn . “Observe that there is never any evidence that anybody but the governess sees the ghosts,” he wrote. The irony within his turn of phrase is that it exemplifies James’s skill. Look, the critic suggests, at the lack of evidence. He is playing James’s game without realizing. Woolf suggested something similar, albeit more positively, in that James’s ghosts “…have their origin within us.”

Wilson may have directed future discussion of James’s story down increasingly psychoanalytical paths but he, along with Woolf and many others, did highlight its chief facet: perception. Seeing and interpreting what is witnessed is key, and is really why the story has worked so well in visual formats; media whose aesthetic can further aid the original so-called trickery, and take the audience into disturbing psychological or supernatural realms.

The Turn of the Screw lived by James’s belief that happy endings and morally pure characters were of little consequence: “It matters little that, as a work of art,” he wrote in Longman’s Magazine in 1884, “it should really be as little or as much concerned to supply happy endings, sympathetic characters, and an objective tone, as if it were a work of mechanics.” In the century that followed, this potential for darkness became a ripe field, especially with the new awareness of the world and its despair in the post-war years. It was here when James’s story became in vogue to adapt on stage and screen. It was also the time when the best adaptations of James’s story were made.

Jack Clayton’s production of The Innocents is legendary for the many stories surrounding it. From script to filming, many names are associated with the adaptation. The change in name to The Innocents came from William Archibald’s 1950 stageplay. Clayton wasn’t the first to use Archibald’s stage rendering, with Lionel Harris adapting a version of it for ITV’s Play of the Week in 1956. Pamela Brown played the unfortunate governess in that rendition.

Clayton’s film took Archibald’s play and paired it down further. With the help of Truman Capote, who paused writing on In Cold Blood to work on it, the adaptation put even more emphasis on what was seen, glimpsed, and imagined. Future adapter of Merriam Modell’s Bunny Lake is Missing John Mortimer further edited the dialogue. Even Harold Pinter, who later worked with the director on an adaptation of Penelope Mortimer’s The Pumpkin Eater in 1964, went against type and suggested, contrary to the temporal collage of his own film work, not to use flashbacks in the script.

On a visual level, Clayton’s interpretation is rich yet sparse. Such was the intensity of lighting used by cinematographer Freddie Francis that Deborah Kerr was said to wear sunglasses in between takes. Jokes abounded as to Francis’s intent to set fire to Sheppteron Studios where the bulk of the studio work was shot, when not using the enigmatic location of Sheffield Park House and Garden. The resulting film became a widely celebrated British horror; one that its director was at pains to separate from other horror films made around it, particularly Hammer Studios’ colorful Gothic romps.

The Innocents epitomized one of James’s most perfectly eerily lines: “He was there or was not there: not there if I didn’t see him.” There’s a disturbing omnipresence throughout the narrative, in which visuals work via insinuation, strange shadows in the reeds and behind icy windows become apparent in their macabre nature only when slowly considered in hindsight.

A great deal of effort goes into the visual composition of Clayton’s film. Bearing witness to such unusual goings on is shared between viewer and main character. It’s a shared experience that, while only echoed in the novella via its epistemological credentials, explains why so many filmmakers are drawn to the story. We and Miss Giddings are seeing things that neither can understand. “We were cut off, really, together; we were united in our danger,” as James wrote. He could have been describing the terrifying pleasures of the cinema experience itself.

In spite of owing as much to Archibald’s stage play as James’s prose, The Innocents captures more than most that half imagined horror of the original novella. Things may or may not be seen, something of a subtlety that feels increasingly rare in screen media. “Ten years ago you could still get away with a film like The Innocents ,” Clayton concluded in a 1983 interview with Starburst Magazine , “which frightened people but used no special effects and made the audience use their imagination.” How things would change as The Turn of the Screw started to rack up adaptation upon adaptation.

Adapting The Turn of the Screw has become a messy ritual in recent decades. This is partly because there’s a sense of going through the motions. It really is the most unlikely of screen traditions. But the main reason for the strangeness is that, such is the volume of adaptation, versions begin to resemble each other. The success of The Innocents has some part to play in this, but cannot be helped considering that the film itself is also a response to an adapted stageplay. Spectral echoes continue on.

In foreshadow to The Innocents , the already discussed ITV play of 1956 played some role in laying the groundwork for its staging, as did the earliest of its screen adaptations, the surprisingly still surviving episode of Omnibus from 1955. The American anthology show adapted the story into a short television play starring the great Geraldine Page. Miles is played by Rex Thompson, the irony being that the young actor would actually have Deborah Kerr play a mother figure to him in several films, namely Young Bess (1953) and The King and I (1956)

The Omnibus script was by Gore Vidal and his version heightened the psychological readings that had dominated the criticism of James’s story; to the point where the play almost explicitly shows the ghosts to be an irresponsible projection on the governess’ part. The little-seen television play can be watched in segments today on YouTube and is still claustrophobic and effective, especially as it toes the line with James’s emphasis on vision. Characters look off behind camera, showing what they see through widening eyes and leering delusion.

Even as Clayton’s film was released, television versions were already proving popular. Aside from these two versions, adaptations were made in Canada and Germany. It was not until the 1970s when filmmakers in particular dared touch the narrative again, especially after the success of Clayton’s film.

In an odd turn, Michael Winner made a prequel to the film called The Nightcomers (1971). It follows Peter Quint played by Marlon Brando as he slowly begins his corruption of the previous governess and the children. Admittedly, the corruption seems to be lighthearted and, as a film, it cannot decide precisely how good or evil to make Quint. The corruption seems at times to be little more than breaking the codes of Victorian decorum.

Out of the later television adaptations, few stand out. The strongest is arguably Dan Curtis’s 1974 feature length adaptation (script by William F. Nolan) starring Lynn Redgrave as the governess. The version has some continuity with Clayton’s, using one member of the original cast (Megs Jenkins as Mrs. Grose) and creating a different but equally heady atmosphere in which the soft focus of the hazy television cameras lulls the viewer into a false sense of ease.

Soon, adaptations were finding other ways to stand out from the pack. Many looked to Benjamin Britten’s complex opera, filming it in relatively straightforward terms. Ironically, it became less about the witnessing of ghosts through sight and more overtly to do with sound. The same aspect could be applied to the growing jump-scare traditions of later versions, which relied on sound for scares rather than the creeping dread of a well realized image.

They would have done better to look to Kate Bush’s “The Infant Kiss,” her song inspired by James’s story featured on the 1980 album Never For Ever . Aside from emphasizing the creepiness of the story’s undertone, the lyrics show an understanding of the role perception plays in James’s story. “There’s a man behind those eyes…” she sings; an eerie reversal of one of her earlier, more famous songs, “The Man with the Child in His Eyes.” In The Turn of the Screw there is very much a child with a man and his eyes, and that man is vile. Eloy de la Iglesia’s 1985 Spanish adaptation comes closest to realizing these disturbing undertones, casting the role of the governess as a troubled male priest.

By the 1990s, the story was on screen in various forms on an almost yearly basis. Consider Rusty Lemorande’s 1992 version with Patsy Kensit, the BBC’s 1994 Britten adaptation introduced by David Hemmings (who played Miles in the early staging of the opera), or Tom McCloughlin’s 1995 adaptation, broadcast under the title of The Haunting of Helen Walker . The end of the decade finalized the trend for endless adaptations. 1999 saw multiple versions released: Antoni Aloy’s Presence of Mind starring Lauren Bacall and a PBS version by Ben Bolt.

In the last two decades, there have been over a dozen versions of the story, most of which are superfluous to use. In cinema, these include Donato Rotunno’s In a Dark Place (2004), Walter Lima Jr.’s Through the Shadow (2015), and Floria Sigismondi’s recent The Turning (2020). Television is responsible for the bulk of adaptations, however, whether it be the bland Netflix rendition The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020) by Mike Flanagan, Tim Fywell’s 2009 version with Michelle Dockery, or Alex Galvin’s 2020 strange meta-take on the narrative which sets itself within a staging of Britten’s chamber opera. 2020 was the final turn in oversaturation, a point where there’s been so many that the coffin is now more metal than wood, to paraphrase one writer.

“The more I go over it,” James wrote in his novella, “the more I see in it, and the more I see in it, the more I fear.” The same cannot be said for the experience of his story on screen. The more versions of The Turn of the Screw that clog up Halloween and Yuletide schedules, the lesser their shocks and shivers become. Equally, it does allow appreciation for Clayton’s version to grow; to understand the precise and water-clear intention of a James adaptation that sees ghosts as glimpsed glitches of the ongoing moment. The governess argues in James’s novella that “I was a screen… I was their protector. The more I saw, the less they would.” How ironic that those fateful days at Bly would ironically become the most seen out of any supernatural fable ever told.

Adam Scovell

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I Am Haunted by My Mother’s Ghost Story

She told us to help us understand her, but what does she want us to know.

By Oscar Villalon | October 29, 2015

The story comes unbidden. Unbidden? I mean to say that I never set out to tell it. Still, I’ve told it many times. There’s usually drinking involved, low lighting; it’s always toward the end of an evening. And so, the story unfurls. Not always, because I’ve seen its effect. I’ve lived with the story for so long—37 years, give or take a year—that I know what it can do to a listener upon hearing it, even though I feel nothing when relating it. I could just as easily be telling the plot of an old Twilight Zone episode. But the story chills people. The guests go quiet. Things get still.

The story isn’t mine. It belongs to my late mother. She was a teenager, living with her family in La Puente, when one night she heard a gentle rapping on her bedroom door. The door opened and her aunt, who was living with them, let her know in a whisper that she was getting up to make breakfast and what would she like to eat? Then she left the room. My mother went rigid with fright, because her aunt had only days before left for a trip to Yucatán. She was trying to make sense of what she had seen when she heard sobbing. It was her older sister, who shared the bedroom with her, crying in the twin bed next to hers. One of them asked the other (my mother couldn’t be sure who spoke), Did you see that? , and the answer was a crashing wave of grief, wailing that woke up my grandfather, who ran to their bedroom to find his daughters repeating over and over, She’s dead, she’s dead. Mi tía está muerta!

There’s more to the story. After my grandfather chides his daughters for being ridiculous, for believing in what they think they saw, just a short time later there’s a phone call, well before the sun has come up. Cut to my grandfather, hurriedly getting ready to leave the house, dragooning my mother—who, at 16, had just earned her California driver’s license—to take him from La Puente to LAX, amid early morning traffic, so he could fly to Yucatán where his sister had been killed in a grisly car accident. Not till many years later did it occur to me that for my mother, an inexperienced driver, having to trek all the way to LAX may have been as terrifying as what she’d seen that night. But when your mother is first telling you her ghost story in your for-whatever-reason darkened apartment, at night, and you couldn’t have been older than eight, that sort of detail can escape you.

There’s more. Soon, the home in La Puente is haunted, or at least the hallway leading to the bedrooms is. First they hear pacing, a padding of “feet” in that hallway behind them as they sit in the living room trying to watch My Three Sons . Then it’s the hallway saturated in perfume, the aunt’s perfume, an unbearable reek. Finally, their priest is consulted and he believes what they tell him, and he agrees to perform an exorcism. He sprinkles the holy water, he recites from the Bible, and he tells the ghost, You don’t belong here anymore. You’re dead. You need to leave. There’s no longer any need for you here. And she goes. No more haunting. The end.

After the sighing, after the blinking, an occasional head shake, someone will ask, When did your mother tell you that story? Of course, when I told this story as a boy, and then as a teen, nobody (or at least no one that I can remember) ever asked that, but I would volunteer that I had heard it when I was a kid, as a way of saying, If you think you’re freaked out, imagine how freaked out I was when I first heard it! It was bragging, like saying I’d ridden on this coaster a bunch of times, so no big deal. But then I’d tell this story in my 20s, 30s, and now 40s. And when revealing the age I first heard it, there’s no comment but certainly an unspoken question: Why would your mother tell you this? Why would she bequeath me her haunting?

I don’t know, and I’ll never know. Over the years, though, I’ve tried to guess. If my memory isn’t completely betraying me, my mother seemed pensive that night. I dare say she seemed sad. I don’t remember my father being in our apartment, though he may well have been shut away in their bedroom. But he certainly wasn’t in that dark living room, the only light coming from our porch light when, sitting on one end of our sofa, she told us about what had once happened to her. I think she forgot we were there, me and my younger brother and baby sister. Maybe she was telling, aloud to herself, this incredible thing from her life, as if to reassure herself her existence wasn’t what it seemed. She had seen a ghost at 16, was married at 19, and had three children by the time she was 26. Her life was circumscribed by taking care of us, taking care of the house, and working a job. But this amazing thing had happened.

Then sometimes I think she knew we were listening, but didn’t mean to terrify us. She just wanted us to know our mother had seen things. That she had been a girl who once drove her bereft father on a busy freeway because her mother and older sister didn’t drive, drove him all the way out to LAX, where she’d never driven to before, palms sweating on the steering wheel, then drove all the way back to La Puente by herself, with probably not so much as a Thomas Brothers in the car to help her if she got lost, and did this and more—had lived with a ghost. That this is the story she meant to tell but couldn’t articulate. That she was brave. That she confronted mystery. This is what she couldn’t say—didn’t know how to say—but only that she had seen the newly dead at her bedroom door, and what does it mean, children? what does it mean?

*An earlier version incorrectly referred to Villalon’s mother as having three children by the age of 24. She was 26 at that time.

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Essay on “Ghost Stories” for School, College Students, Long and Short English Essay, Speech for Class 8, 9, 10, 12 and Competitive Exams.

Ghost Stories

There was a time when even well-educated and levelheaded persons swallowed every tale of the supernatural they came across as gospel truth. And there was a later time when all scientists who valued their reputation would meet every so-called “ghost story” with the vulgar, but emphatic expression, “Rats!” But the modern attitude towards the question is more cautious and open-minded, and so more scientific. In view of the mass of well-authenticated evidence collected and sifted by the Society for Psychical Research, we can no longer airily dismiss all ghost stories as fraud, illusion, or pure fiction. To refuse to face facts is silly and unscientific. The question now is, “Have we any scientific and credible explanation of the proved facts?”

Of course many, ghost stories are pure fiction ; and many can be explained by natural causes. With these we are not concerned. But it has been proved over and over again that people have seen figures exactly like those of friends who had died. The question is, Were these appearances really the spirits of their dead friends, or something else ?

Now it is well known that some people when ill or nervously overwrought sometimes have what are called “spectral illusions”. Such appearances are “illusions”, for they are not real, and “spectral” because people seem to see them with their eyes. They are, in fact, a kind of waking dream. Many ghost stories can be explained in this way. They are true, for the story was not made up; but what was seen was not a “ghost” but a thought-image in the mind.

But this does not explain all such strange appearances. There are many true stories of people seeing the figure of a friend who at that very moment was (unknown to them) really dying at a distance. There must be some connection between the mind of the dying person and the person who sees the vision. It is not believed that one mind can directly influence another mind without the help of the physical senses. This is called “telepathy”. Such visions are probably telepathic. This is, the image of the dying friend, an illusion caused by the influence of the dying person’s mind on the mind of the friend who sees the appearance.

Now there are well-authenticated cases of such visions of persons already dead. These may be due to the influence of the dead person’s mind on that of the living. Many learned scientists, such as Sir Oliver Lodge, believe in such “ghosts”; and base on them their belief in the survival of the soul after death.

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Top 10 Short Ghost Story in English 100, 200, 500 Words PDF

Short & long ghost story in english.

10 Top Short & Long Ghost Story in English 100, 200, 500 Words: You can Download PDF of all these ghost stories from the link given below. Today we will introduce you to some such scary and ghostly stories which you will be shocked to read. Some such things are difficult to believe, yet we cannot live without reading them, so let’s start with 10 such best scary and ghost stories.

Ghost Story in English

1. ghost in the lift.

This story is from Delhi, we used to live in Ambedkar Colony. The name of our building was Apsara. There was a rumor that there is a ghost in the lift! In fact, a woman had committed suicide by jumping from the 14th floor. Since then people used to say that the ghost of that woman is seen in the lift!

Our house was on the fifth floor! Although I didn’t believe much in the ghost thing, still I was afraid to go on the lift at night! Well, I didn’t even need a lift.

One day I was coming back home with a friend of mine. He also lived in the same building! At that time it was around 10:00 at the night. We were scared to go in the elevator! But we didn’t want to show each other that we were scared! So we got into the elevator! The lift reached the third floor, and the door was half open and closed by itself!

The lift started going up! We tried to stop the lift but none of the buttons were working! The lift went to the top floor and then came down to the bottom floor. This happened 7-8 times and then the lift stopped on the 14th floor. The elevator door opened on its own!

We were very scared! We quickly ran downstairs off the lift and enter our respective homes! Everyone in the house asked why I was panting, so I made an excuse that I was coming after a race with a friend. After that day I never used the lift again during the day!

2. The Witch on the Roof

My name is Amar! I am going to tell you all a story I saw with one eye! The matter is 5 years old, at that time we used to live in Lucknow city. For some days there was a rumor of a witch roaming in our locality.

Some people said that they have seen a scary woman walking in the night! Sometimes she is seen roaming on the roof of houses and sometimes in the streets.

Because of this people stopped sleeping on the terrace. The streets used to become deserted as soon as it got dark. One day the people of the locality together kept watch for the whole night, but no one came!

I didn’t believe it at all, I used to make fun of anyone who talked about witches! I believed that this is the misconception of the people or some person is scaring the people!

One night the lights went out! Everyone inside was asleep in the summer! No one dared to go on the roof for fear of the witch! I was also forbidden to go upstairs! But when the heat could not be tolerated, I took my bed and went to the terrace!

Reaching the roof, I saw a woman sitting on the eaves of the roof! She had a piece of meat in her hand which she was eating! His face was on the other side! Only his hands looked like animals! My condition worsened after seeing all this!

I ran away leaving my bed there and bolting the door! From that day I also believed in the witch talk!

For the next few days, there were incidents of seeing a witch, but after a few days, the witch stopped appearing! People’s fear also started to end! But I will never forget what I saw!

3. Ghost in the Pond

It’s about when I was 10-11 years old! It was summer vacation! I had gone to my village! There was no work in the village other than having fun! There was no freedom in the city which was there in the village.

There was a pond near the village. One day I asked my brother who lived in the village to walk there. He told that a ghost lives in that pond! If you go there, you will be killed!

I said go secretly no one will know! The next day in the afternoon when everyone was resting at home, we both left secretly! We even took our fishing gear! After reaching the pond, we started fishing!

After a while, my brother got up from there and went somewhere. I was left there alone, suddenly someone pushed me hard from behind! I fell into the pond! The pond was not very deep, but still, I could not get out! Like someone is pulling me inside!

I was out of breath! Meanwhile, someone grabbed my hand and pulled me up! He was none other than my brother! After a while when I became normal I asked why did you push me?

He swore he didn’t push! It seemed from his face that he was not lying! We both quickly ran out of there and never went there again!

4. Haunted House

It’s been almost 5 years since then my aunt’s health had deteriorated a lot! She used to do wrong things and used to say anything to anyone.

We have seen many doctors but to no avail! Then one of our relatives told us that he was possessed by a witch and that he would have to be taken to Balaji! The housemates left for Balaji without delay!

As soon as Balaji reached, aunt got down from the car and went inside running. Frightened, even the family members followed him. Going there, it was found that uncle had cut down a tree in his garden in which the witch and her children lived!

The witch had come to break into their house! But after a little persuasion there, she agreed! He asked for milk for his hungry children! Uncle brought milk and as soon as he wanted to give milk to him, he refused and said my children will drink sweet milk!

Uncle bought jalebi from the front and put it in milk! After that, the witch asked to plant a tree in the forest and also asked to keep milk under it every day for 2 years!

After that aunt started recovering and everyone came back, but while coming back, aunt started doing some strange things again! The family members got very upset! On asking, it was found that now it is the shadow of some other ghost!

He told that my uncle used to have a dream a few years back! In the dream, a man used to ask him for water. He told that he is the same man! What happened after this, no one told anything even after asking a lot! But the aunt was absolutely fine, which everyone was satisfied with!

5. Aunt’s Ghost

This story is from my village! There my two uncles and their family used to live in the village. Everything was going well but my great-uncle died in a road accident! Shortly after that my great aunt also died!

After that my younger uncle and his family also left the village house and came to the city. After a few months, my younger uncle had to go to the village house to get it repaired! They started the repair work on the house!

One evening after finishing the repair work, my uncle was lying on the terrace at 10 pm. They saw the ghost of my great-aunt sitting in the courtyard! My uncle’s eyes were filled with tears! As he reached the bottom of the stairs, he saw my great aunt sitting at the bottom of the stairs, staring back at him!

Seeing this, my uncle was completely scared and lost his senses! After that when he regained consciousness, he went to the neighbor’s house. He told them the whole scene! After that my uncle’s health deteriorated badly. He quickly came to the city but never forgot that thing!

6. Mother’s love

Ramesh who is 25 years old is newly married and has a beautiful wife. Both of them went to Himachal for their honeymoon where they spent 5 days.

Now it was time for him to return to his home. Both sat in their car and left for Noida. It was 10:00 at the night. Now they were about to cross the valley of Himachal, the road was completely deserted and the car was going very fast.

Suddenly Ramesh saw a woman in front of his car who was wearing a red saree. She was stopping the car by waving her hand from a distance. Seeing him, Ramesh’s wife refused to stop the car as she was afraid that it might be a conspiracy to commit a robbery. Suddenly the woman came in front of the car due to Ramesh had to stop the car.

The woman started banging loudly on the door. From the expression on his face, it seemed as if he was in some big trouble. Ramesh’s wife refused to open the car door. She said it could be some trick, we should not go out.

Ramesh said that if she was really in trouble then she would need us because looking at her she was looking good from home. As soon as I said this, Ramesh opened the car door and came out.

The woman said in a panic, “Please help me”. Ramesh said what happened. He replied that my car had fallen into the ditch below and hit a tree and my little girl was trapped in it. Please take him out.

On hearing this, Ramesh’s wife also came out and all three went toward the ditch. Saw that the car had collided with a tree a little below and a small girl sitting behind was crying. Ramesh tried a lot, then the door of the car opened. Ramesh took that girl out and kept her in his lap, but the girl was still crying.

That’s why Ramesh’s eyes went to the one in front where he felt someone sitting. When Ramesh saw it, his feet and tail slipped on the ground. He couldn’t believe it, he saw that there was none other than the mother of the child in the front seat who was calling Ramesh for help.

Ramesh saw that blood was coming out from the forehead of that woman and she had died. Ramesh’s wife came to him and she too was surprised to see her.

On seeing this, Ramesh and his wife looked back and saw where the woman was standing but now she was no one.

7. Hostel Ghost

There is a college near our village. It is counted as a very good educational institution. Children come from far and wide to get an education here.

It was about 9 years back. A boy used to study while staying in the hostel here. He was very intelligent and friendly. The children living with him in the hostel used to call him Sonu Bhai.

Once upon a time, he went to his village for 10 days to attend his elder brother’s wedding. After 10 days that boy started coming back to the hostel. But used to talk less with his friends, even though he did not eat food with his friends and used to say that he will eat later.

Now he was also less interested in studies, when the children with him wanted to talk to him, he used to talk about work, do not know where he lived during the day, and came to the hostel at night only to sleep. It was only a week since he came to the hostel from home that one day Sonu Bhai’s family members came to the hostel.

A boy told his family that Sonu Bhai comes to sleep only at night. Sonu’s family members started crying after listening to the boy and said how can he come even at night. We have come to collect his belongings.

Sonu is no more. Two days after leaving here, he was going to a relative’s place by motorcycle, his motorcycle collided with a speeding truck and he died. By saying this, those people started becoming more intense.

There were children in the hostel who were listening to the talk and they started crying. They were thinking again and again whether the boy who was with them at night whom they used to see was the ghost of Sonu Bhai.

Well after that day Sonu’s ghost never again came to the hostel to sleep and for many months all the children of the hostel were scared. The lock remained hanging in Sonu Bhai’s living room. He kept saying that Sonu Bhai had a lot of attachment to his hostel, so even after being late, he could not leave the hostel.

It is said that even today the children used to sleep with Sonu Bhai. They live in fear, and can’t say whether this incident is right or wrong, because I have heard about this incident from the villagers.

8. Do not turn back, death is certain

Friends, one night I was going from my village to the bus stand with my friend late at night on the way to the farm, then one of my friends said, “Friend, walk a little faster, there is some problem with this field to the next two fields” so I asked what’s the matter If yes, he repeatedly avoided the matter.

But when I put more pressure, he told the whole story.

Many years ago a man was passing through these fields at night from his village. Went under a tree to urinate on the way. After that, as he walked a little, he heard the cry of a child.

He thought it would be the child of the night watchman, but only then he remembered that this field belongs to Rameshwar who died hanging here 3 years back.

The man kept moving forward with fearful steps. The words of those people will be remembered in his mind. Never turn back at night while passing through this farm. If someone asks for a way, don’t look at his feet. Do not listen to anyone no matter how much they say.

Thinking all these things in his mind, that man’s condition became very bad and started thinking about why he did not think about all this before coming here. As he progressed, the child’s voice became louder and it seemed as if he was walking with him.

Then suddenly he saw that a child was crying under the tree, so fearing, he called out whose child it was, but there was no response.

Due to fear, he went ahead but hearing the child’s cry, he could not help it and he looked back. He saw that the child was lying behind him in the swing. Taking this child in his lap out of mercy, he started running away. After a while, that child started to feel heavy for him.

He was shocked to see that his feet were long and almost touching the ground. He panicked and dropped the child. As soon as the child fell down, the child laughed loudly like a grown man. You were saved today, if my feet had touched the ground, no one could have saved you here today. Your death was certain. That child disappeared.

The man reached the house fell down and fainted as soon as he reached home when he regained consciousness, he told the whole story to the villagers, as soon as I heard this, without turning back in panic, he ran as fast as and did not go ever back to that field.

9. Soldier’s Ghost

This matter is of Madhya Pradesh. I was coming back from the fair with my friend. We both were very tired so we were not talking much. Suddenly my friend started mumbling something. He was speaking something in Punjabi, but he did not know Punjabi and was asking questions and answering himself.

I could not understand why he was doing this. I thought he might be joking. Was demanding something from himself and was saying to himself that I do not have it.

After going a little distance, the road split into two. One way went towards the village and the other towards the forest. There my friend called my name Mohan and fainted there.

I saw a man wearing a military uniform and a green turban walking toward the forest. He disappeared after going a short distance. I somehow brought my friend home and told the whole thing.

There was a little tension in his house. But in a short, while he regained consciousness and after a few prayers, everything became normal.

I had heard many stories of ghosts but can never forget the incident I saw with my eyes.

10. Old Cemetery

This is not a fictional story or a movie story but it is true as seen by the eyes. I went on a picnic on behalf of my company. The picnic was at a resort outside the city.

Earlier the people of the company played cricket and other games. After that, we went to the water park. There were only a few people swimming in deep water, the rest all were swimming in less deep water.

We friends made a bet. A coin will be thrown into the water and the one who finds the coin in the least time will be able to find it. He will win.

Everyone dived in turn, but no one ever found the coin. It was my turn next, I jumped into the water, but everything changed as soon as I entered the water. I found that the cemetery was visible under the ground.

There was a woman standing there who did not look Indian in face and dress. He had the same coin in his hand. She stood with her hand raised up. It seemed as if she was standing to give the coin to me.

As he was moving forward in his hypnosis. In a few moments, I was close to him and I took the coin from his hand. As soon as I started coming back, he grabbed my hand and pulled me. Now she and my face were faces to face.

In an instant, his face changed and took on a terrifying look. His eyes were bleeding and there was a sinister smile on his face. There was no limit to my fear. I trembled with fear.

I released my hand, and after that, both the graveyard and the woman disappeared and I caught myself. I felt as if I was in a dream. I quickly came out of the water and went away and sat down. I was out of breath.

My friends started helping me. Everyone asked what happened. I replied nothing. I opened my fist and saw that the coin was in my hand. Seeing this, my friends started dancing with joy and started congratulating me.

Friends bet again, but I did not go into the water again. It was evening, our bus was about to leave. Some of us went out to smoke cigarettes. My friends were joking and laughing out loud.

An uncle standing in front of us was listening to our talk and was cracking up every now and then. I stood silently, and one of my friends jokingly asked why I was silent since then.

Have you seen any ghosts inside? Hearing this, the uncle jokingly said that this used to be a graveyard during the British era. You must have seen a lot of fair people.

Everyone started laughing after hearing this but I was really sure that what I had seen was not my illusion.

Let’s hope so! You must have liked all these ( Ghost Story in English ) ghost stories. If you like such interesting stories then comment us in the comment box.

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A Novelist Comes Home to Bury Her Words, and Brings Them Back to Life

In Julia Alvarez’s “The Cemetery of Untold Stories,” a boneyard in the Dominican Republic becomes a rich wellspring for discarded narratives.

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By Luis Alberto Urrea

Luis Alberto Urrea’s most recent novel is “Good Night, Irene.”

THE CEMETERY OF UNTOLD STORIES , by Julia Alvarez

The best stories live within us long after the final word; characters and places continue beyond the lines on a page. Yet the image of all the unfinished, unsatisfying, impossible stories we leave in our wakes haunts the writer as well as the reader. And with more than 20 books published across a three-decade career, no one may be haunted more than Julia Alvarez.

The hero of Alvarez’s seventh novel, Alma Cruz, is a writer from the Dominican Republic who has come to the United States and created a literary life, beginning with critically acclaimed books about the motherland and evolving into a chronicler of life in the U.S.A. (Longtime readers of Alvarez’s work will recognize her own trajectory, from her early classics like “How the García Girls Lost Their Accents” and “In the Time of the Butterflies” through poetry, memoir, children’s books and more.)

The famous author has always wrestled shadow and sunlight, laughter and agony, into tales that sometimes felt like ghost stories. Readers knew to seek the truths behind the narrative — to find sorrow in the funniest scenes, or the unexpected outburst of joy in a somber one. Of course, I am speaking about Alma Cruz. (But also, Julia Alvarez.)

One day, Alma decides she has had enough with the fame game, the big career and its ups and downs. She comes to a lovely conclusion: It is time to return to the homeland she fled, and she will take all the drafts of her unfinished or unpublished books and lay them to rest there, giving each a proper burial. She buys a plot of land and begins to build a graveyard.

The locals become a fantastic choir of curious, suspicious, baffled neighbors: One rumor has it that “the place will be a resort, which would provide employment for maids, gardeners, waiters, cooks, watchmen”; another imagines “a grand house, complete with a swimming pool, a tennis court, a mini putting green.” Still another posits, “A baseball academy would be a dream come true for the tigueritos roaming the streets. Keep them out of trouble.” But when they realize Alma is building a graveyard, the outburst is comedic: a cemetery! Fear of zombies immediately clashes with the fear of homeless people defecating in mausoleums — and what kinds of jobs, by the way, are there in a boneyard? They have more reckoning to do when they realize Alma intends to put her stories in the ground, literally.

Word goes out that the great author has returned, and the locals flock to her like butterflies, everyone eager to share. A festival of storytelling breaks out in the tropics. Are the neighbors hoping to bury their own or are they giving life to tales untold? No matter. Rumors and gossip, histories and familial dramas swirl around Alma. “A little bird told me. Había una vez. Cuentan los viejos. Some scandal on the news, who is sleeping with whom, what fulano has done or said to fulana, a juicy chisme, a hot rumor. …” Amid the chatter, Alma’s own stories, the ones she has come home to bury, somehow find their place.

Soon Alma is meeting with architects, and more characters join in the cumbia of story — the dueling Perla and Filomena, who have not spoken for 30 years but keep each other’s phone numbers just in case. It is a shadowy feud, of course: “Way back, Filomena destroyed Perla’s peace of mind. The story has been buried so deep, it should have rotted into oblivion. But like Lazarus in la Biblia, it keeps coming back to life.”

Indeed. Here comes the fabulous Bienvenida (it means “Welcome”), with her tragic history that Alma cannot resist. She was once, you see, the wife of the dictator, Trujillo, a loyal and devoted first lady who is cast aside when she is unable to produce an heir. Eventually, El Jefe falls for the charms of another woman — “jealous and possessive, with a will equal to his own” — and Bienvenida’s “death knell comes when this mistress gives birth to a son.”

Men and boys, too, join in with their dramas and secrets, pride and regrets. As voices and stories are set free, it feels like a carnival, a festival. Alma’s first-person voice is jostled. We do not care; we are already in the warm sun and the sea wind and the cooking smells and the music of the dance.

As the book accelerates, the characters seem to become their own novelists. They rewrite their lives, they revise their histories, they reinvent their ongoing myths even as Alma is planning to bury her own stories in their troubled, sacred earth. Only an alchemist as wise and sure as Alvarez could swirl the elements of folklore and the flavor of magical realism around her modern prose and make it all sing.

The camino that “The Cemetery of Untold Stories” travels — from Vermont to the Dominican Republic, from literary fame to chosen retreat, from modern American writing to a profoundly Latin American tone — is lively, joyous, full of modern details and old tall tales. Any reader with roots and ancestors in other lands lives in a multiple-narrative story, one that we try to share with everyone, though we have to translate it. Yet we also go back to the ancestral home, and find ourselves translating our Yanqui life as well. Which story is the truest?

This often witty, occasionally somber and elegiac novel begins with a simple exhortation, in English: “Tell me a story.” It ends on a melancholy and evocative note. Spoiler alert: Another single line, this time in Spanish after the last page concludes, announces, “Este cuento se ha acabado.” (This story has ended.) A definitive slam of the door.

THE CEMETERY OF UNTOLD STORIES | By Julia Alvarez | Algonquin | 256 pp. | $28

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50 Spooky Writing Prompts and Horror Story Ideas
These are all from my book 5 ,000 Writing Prompts: A Master List of Plot Ideas, Creative Exercises, and More. The book has 100 additional spooky writing prompts and horror story ideas, as well as master plots and idea starters for all kinds of writing. If you are easily scared and have an over-active imagination, just skip this one.
Short Horror Story Essay 8 Models
2- Giving up bad behavior. 3- Repressing the evil instincts that are inside every human being. 4- Controlling the child in the safety zone next to the parents. 5- Planting correct means and methods through intimidation. Several years ago, my father told me a story about a boy who went out without telling his family where he was going.
How to Write a Ghost Story: 11 Steps (with Pictures)
Try to think of why your character is in the situation they are. Imagine how your character would react to the events in your story. Try to get a clear mental picture of what your character looks like. 2. Create your antagonist. The antagonist in a story is most easily understood to be the "bad guy".
How to Write a Chilling Ghost Story
Stuart MacBride does this brilliantly in his first Logan McRae book, Cold Granite. While it isn't a ghost story, his crime is the perfect balance of plot, characters, and description. The description brings the characters, world, and plot to life in a way that most writers never achieve.
How to structure a ghost story
Go back to the first graphic and see if you can 'check off' the elements in the boxes as you enter ideas into the sheet. Finally, write it. Again, don't feel tied to this structure, and be willing to allow sections to merge and bleed into one another. In fact, I'd say this will be essential for the story to have a natural, unforced flow.
The Ghost Story Critical Essays
The Ghost Story. A popular form of literature in which supernatural elements are central to plot, theme, and character development. The following entry presents criticism on the representation of ...
6 Tips for Writing a Contemporary Ghost Story
6 Tips for Writing a Contemporary Ghost Story. R.M. Romero offers six tips for writing contemporary ghost stories, with examples of how she incorporated them into the process of writing her new novel, The Ghosts of Rose Hill. R.M. Romero. May 3, 2022. We have always had to grapple with death and what (if anything) happens to us after our ...
How to Write a Ghost Story
When you're figuring out how to write a ghost story, world building is crucial. Even though setting is an important ingredient in ghost stories, don't get too caught up with describing all the spooky details. Give your readers a taste at the beginning of your story so the stage is set in their minds, and then layer in details as the story ...
How To Write A Ghost Story
How to Write a Ghost Story: Point of View and Choice of Tense. One of the first things to do when deciding how to write your ghost story, is to choose a point of view. There are many writing books written on point of view and tense, but here are my thoughts: Your primary aim is to create a chill. You need to get the reader feeling along with ...
On the Most Adapted Ghost Story of All Time ‹ Literary Hub
James was acquainted with another noted exponent of the English ghost story, E.F. Benson. Benson's father Edward White Benson was the Archbishop of Canterbury and, on a visit to his house in 1895, the archbishop purportedly told James a story. ... In an essay for The Times Literary Supplement she wrote that James's characters " ...
25 Horror Writing Prompts: How to Write Scary Stories
25 Horror Writing Prompts. 1. A scary doll comes to life. 2. A scene from a nightmare comes true the next day. 3. Days go by, and your parents don't come home. 4. You feel yourself slowly becoming a monster.
25+ Ghost Story Prompts: Scary Ghost Writing Prompts
25+ Ghost Story Prompts. The spookiest time of year is here, and that means it's time for ghost stories! Whether you're writing a ghost story for Halloween, a seasonal short story, or even a standalone novel, these ghost story prompts are a great place to start:. A young woman moves into an old house and finds herself in a terrifying situation with her new roommate, a ghost.
What Is the Best Ghost Story Ever Written?
It is vital to note that English literature is full of scary masterpieces, but to my way of thinking, the most chilling ghost story is The Secret of Crickley Hall, a supernatural thriller novel written by the British writer James Herbert published in October 2006. An insatiable desire to read this book overtook me as soon as I looked at the ...
Ghost Stories essay
In this essay I will be writing about the ghost story genre. The ghost story genre is different to other types of story because it creates tension and suspense among the audience. Also authentic ghost stories involve supernatural beings. These factors make ghost stories unique. Ghosts have always appeared in plays and stories; for example ...
On A Ghost Story Free Essay Example
On A Ghost Story. Categories: Fiction. Download. Essay, Pages 5 (1016 words) Views. 79. A great deal of us struggle for many years deciding what we want to do with our lives, but Peter Straub knew since high school he wanted to be a writer. Peter Straub is a notable alumnus of the University of Wisconsin and is a New York Times's bestselling ...
110+ Horror Writing Prompts (With A Twist)
September 30, 2022. Give yourself the chills with this list of over 110 horror writing prompts. From scary ghost stories to creepy stories about animals and monsters. Now is the time to write your own horror story, just like Goosebumps or The Haunting of Aveline Jones. From the gory to the scary, from the monstrous to the supernatural, from the ...
I Am Haunted by My Mother's Ghost Story
But when your mother is first telling you her ghost story in your for-whatever-reason darkened apartment, at night, and you couldn't have been older than eight, that sort of detail can escape you. There's more. Soon, the home in La Puente is haunted, or at least the hallway leading to the bedrooms is. First they hear pacing, a padding of ...
Ghost Story Write up
Ghost Story Write up. I think the most successful ghost story; out of 'The Red Room' by H.G. Wells and 'Farthing House' by Susan Hill is the latter. Both of the stories that we have read explore the feelings of horror and fear. In each story the characters react very different to the different types of ghost that they meet.
Criticism: The Ghost Story In European And English Literature
Athens: Ohio University Press, 1978. [ In the following essay, Sullivan evaluates the influence of M. R. James on several English ghost story writers. The publication of M. R. James's Ghost ...
Essay on "Ghost Stories" for School, College Students, Long and Short
Essay on "Ghost Stories" for School, College Students, Long and Short English Essay, Speech for Class 8, 9, 10, 12 and Competitive Exams. ... Hindi Essay, English Essay, Punjabi Essay, Biography, General Knowledge, Ielts Essay, Social Issues Essay, Letter Writing in Hindi, English and Punjabi, Moral Stories in Hindi, English and Punjabi. ...
Ghost Story Essay.
AS and A Level English. Ghost Story Essay. Prologue. It was the battle of 1801; the lives of thousands of people had been lost in the battle between two rival groups in York. The two sides, the Roundheads led by General M. Taylor and the Caxtons led by Commander L. Jackson. Both leaders wouldn't back down; thousands of innocent people were ...
Ghost story
English Macbeth Essay; APA 7th editions - with in-text -simplified-final; Eng 110 June Exam 2022; Arms and the man by bernard shaw; The Great Gatsby Chapters; Preview text "Ghost Story" by Niq Mhlongo is one of the South African short stories which. "Ghost Story" is a thought-provoking short story that explores themes of inequality ...
Top 10 Short Ghost Story in English 100, 200, 500 Words PDF
Ghost Story in English. 1. Ghost in the Lift. This story is from Delhi, we used to live in Ambedkar Colony. The name of our building was Apsara. There was a rumor that there is a ghost in the lift! In fact, a woman had committed suicide by jumping from the 14th floor. Since then people used to say that the ghost of that woman is seen in the ...
Book Review: 'The Cemetery of Untold Stories,' by Julia Alvarez
The best stories live within us long after the final word; characters and places continue beyond the lines on a page. Yet the image of all the unfinished, unsatisfying, impossible stories we leave ...

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Essay on “Ghost Stories” for School, College Students, Long and Short English Essay, Speech for Class 8, 9, 10, 12 and Competitive Exams.

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